Many people suspect that these bots are part of an AI company’s effort to collect training data from web pages. In 2025, AI bots accounts for a significant portion of overall web trafficwhich crawls the internet for text and other information to feed the data hungry major language models.

But there are some significant differences between these Chinese bots and other AI bots. First, there are more of them. King said on his website that traffic from China and Singapore accounted for 22 percent of total traffic, while all other AI bots accounted for less than 10 percent combined.

Most of the leading AI companies clearly identify their bots to website operators, which also makes them easier to block. Frontier AI labs are “not as interested in evading” bot-blocking rules, said Brent Maynard, senior director of security technology and strategy at internet infrastructure company Akamai. He says that AI companies usually only start trying to disguise their bots after a website closes the front door. This wave of Chinese bots, however, disguised themselves as normal human users from the start, and they even broke the standard bot blocking rules, several website owners told WIRED.

Besides AI companies, there are other businesses that are motivated to scrape the internet, including search crawlers and intelligence gathering companies.

Rising Costs and Distorting Data

The good news, at least for now, is that the bots don’t seem to have any obvious malicious intent. They haven’t been publicly connected to any cyberattacks and don’t seem to be scanning for vulnerabilities. But the lack of a clear motive also adds to the confusion.

Some website owners worry that bots are scanning copyrighted material without permission. Others say the surge is forcing them to pay more for bandwidth, as bot traffic outnumbers human users, or to invest in more sophisticated blocking tools. Visits also skew traffic analytics, distorting reports about who is actually visiting their sites.

But the biggest impact will be felt by people who earn income from attracting ad clicks to their websites. “It destroys my AdSense strategies,” said Quintero, the paranormal blog owner, “because they say (your website) is only visited by bots, so your content is not something valuable to the viewer.” As a result, websites like his may appear less desirable to advertisers and penalized by Google.

Repair Solutions

Many people have complained about the China AI bot problem in online support channels over the past few months, or sent messages about it directly to their web-hosting providers. But until now, there are still few concrete answers.

Contacted by WIRED, WordPress acknowledged that it has seen reports in recent months that some of its sites are experiencing increased traffic from suspected AI bots or scrapers. “WordPress websites always have a good structure that makes them easily found and indexed by search engines. Those same capabilities make them easy to crawl (in) AI as well,” the company said in an unsigned email. Google, Cloudflare, and Squarespace did not respond to requests for comment.