Many people suspect that these bots are part of an artificial intelligence company’s effort to collect training data from websites. In 2025, AI-powered bots accounted for a significant portion of total web traffic, crawling the Internet for text and other information that could be fed to immense, data-intensive language models.
However, there are some key differences between these Chinese bots and other AI bots. First, there are simply so many more of them. King says on its website that traffic from China and Singapore makes up 22 percent of total traffic, while all other AI bots together account for just under 10 percent.
Most leading AI companies clearly identify their bots to site operators, which also makes them easier to block. Frontier AI labs “are not as interested in bypassing” bot blocking policies, says Brent Maynard, senior director of technology and security strategy at internet infrastructure company Akamai. He says artificial intelligence companies usually start trying to hide their bots only after a website closes its front door. But this wave of Chinese bots has been masquerading as regular people from the beginning, and has even bypassed common bot blocking policies, several site owners told WIRED.
In addition to artificial intelligence companies, there are other companies encouraged to search the Internet, including search robots and intelligence gathering companies.
Rising costs and distorted data
The good news, at least for now, is that the bots don’t appear to have an overtly malicious purpose. They have not been publicly linked to any cyberattack and do not appear 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 has forced them to pay higher bandwidth fees as bot traffic displaces humans, or to invest in more sophisticated prevention tools. Visits also skew traffic analysis, distorting reports of who is actually visiting their sites.
But the biggest impact is felt by people who make money by driving clicks to ads on their sites. “It’s destroying my AdSense strategies,” says Quintero, owner of a paranormal blog, “because they say [your website is] are only visited by bots, so your content is of no value to the viewer.” As a result, sites like his may be perceived as less desirable by advertisers and penalized by Google.
Makeshift solutions
Over the past few months, many people have complained about the Chinese AI bot issue in online support channels or sent messages about it directly to their hosting providers. However, there are few concrete answers so far.
Contacted by WIRED, WordPress admitted that in recent months it had received reports of increased traffic to some of its sites from suspicious bots or artificial intelligence scrapers. “WordPress sites have always had a great structure that makes them easy to find and index by search engines. These same capabilities make them easy to index [by] Also artificial intelligence,” the company said in an unsigned email. Google, Cloudflare and Squarespace did not respond to requests for comment.