A surge of automated traffic primarily from Chinese bots has affected various types of websites globally, raising concerns among webmasters about the nature of this anomalous activity.
In recent months, a strange wave of automated traffic has impacted websites of all kinds, from personal blogs to U.S. government portals. The discovery began almost randomly for Alejandro Quintero, a data analyst from Bogotá, who owns a site dedicated to the paranormal, which suddenly saw a flood of visitors from China and Singapore. Initially, Quintero believed he had found a new international audience, but deeper data analysis revealed the truth: nearly all visitors originated from a single Chinese city, Lanzhou, and displayed bot-like behavior, staying on pages for zero seconds and not interacting with any content. This anomaly was not isolated; numerous website operators, ranging from e-commerce portals to weather sites with millions of pages, as well as U.S. government domains, confirmed similar spikes in suspicious traffic.
