Our dev.ua was flooded with clicks from Chinese bots. 57,000 unique users came to our site from China in March alone. And in February their number was even more than 67,000. In the list of countries from which readers come to us, China came in second place (after Ukraine), overtaking the USA and European countries!
Our dev.ua was flooded with clicks from Chinese bots. 57,000 unique users came to our site from China in March alone. And in February their number was even more than 67,000. In the list of countries from which readers come to us, China came in second place (after Ukraine), overtaking the USA and European countries!
According to Google Analytics, the strange influx of Chinese users to our site began around the fall of last year. The numbers weren’t that significant and we simply didn’t pay attention to them. But they grew from month to month. And very quickly.
We don’t have a Chinese version of the site, and it’s unlikely that our resource suddenly became popular among Chinese users. We understood that something was clearly wrong.
Visits from these users were not very useful. Moreover, they started to wash away our overall statistics, because their visit was short-lived. The average session time on the site was leaking.
I asked my colleague at another publication if Chinese people were visiting him. It turned out that they were. Moreover, he started banning them (blocking such IPs on the hosting), because such massive and useless visits simply forced him to switch to a new hosting plan (more expensive), which he didn’t want to do.
My colleague believes that these users are definitely bots. And I decided to see if the American press had written about these activities.
As it turns out, yes. The problem is massive and affects the whole world. From small publishers to US federal agencies, websites are reporting unusual spikes in automated traffic linked to IP addresses in Lanzhou, China, Wired reported in February of this year.
While the bots' function is unclear, experts say they may be an attempt to collect data to train artificial intelligence models.
Alejandro Quintero, a data analyst in Bogotá, Colombia, runs a website that publishes articles about paranormal activity. Since the content is written in «Spanish,» he was surprised to see a surge of interest from Asia, which accounted for more than half of his site’s total views in 2025.
Quintero thought, «I need to go to China right now because I’m the bomb there.»
But upon further investigation, he discovered that the traffic was coming from only one Chinese city, Lanzhou, with each visit lasting an average of 0 seconds.
According to data published by Wired, 14,7% of visits to US government websites in the past 90 days came from Lanzhou, and 6,6% came from Singapore.
And a Colombian publisher complained to Wired that bot visits were ruining its AdSense strategy: «We’re told that your website is only visited by bots, so your content is not valuable to the viewer.» This means that such websites are unlikely to attract the same advertisers and could be penalized by Google’s algorithms.
In short, after reading this, yesterday we at dev.ua also decided to block traffic from these strange IP addresses from China. And today we are clean.
I’m not sure yet if Google will «praise» us for this, but we’ll see. Let’s make this our experiment.
We don’t need fake visitors.
Finally, I’ll say that what surprises me most in this story is the volume of this automated traffic. If this is really real volume, and not a Google Analytics glitch, then it is dozens of times higher than the requests from the same ChatGPT that we also notice.
What is this China training to make its bots overwhelm the entire internet?
Well, let’s see :)
Цій проблемі майже рік уже. Причому боти приходять не тільки з Китаю (Ланьчжоу), а і із Сингапуру і Гонконгу.
У разі їх блокування вони з'являться з інших країн - Бразилії, В'єтнам
і інших.
Схоже це парсери для отримання контенту, ціль - навчання ШІ ботів.