Since last year, website administrators across Western countries have been dealing with a strange and sustained spike in traffic traced to China and Singapore. What initially appeared to be a promising expansion of international audiences quickly turned into a technical puzzle involving automated traffic, widely described as Chinese bots, with no clear explanation.
The unusual activity first drew attention when site owners noticed dramatic increases in visits originating from Asia. At face value, the numbers looked encouraging. But deeper analysis revealed something unusual: the visitors were not behaving like people.
Paranormal Activities Website Overrun by Chinese Bots
In October, Alejandro Quintero of Colombia, who operates a website dedicated to paranormal activities, saw a dramatic surge in visitors from China and Singapore. According to Wired, the spike was so large that traffic from those two locations accounted for more than half of his site’s total visitors over the past year. For a niche site focused on paranormal activities, the sudden international exposure was unexpected but initially exciting.
That excitement did not last long.
Analytics data showed that the visitors stayed on the site for an average of zero seconds. They did not scroll, click, or interact with any content. Further review indicated that all of the traffic appeared to originate from a single Chinese city: Lanzhou.
The pattern strongly suggested automation. Quintero concluded that instead of gaining readers interested in paranormal activities, his website was being flooded by Chinese bots.
He was not alone.
Wired reported that similar bot traffic was affecting a wide range of websites, including an Indian lifestyle magazine, a blog about a small island near Canada, a weather-forecasting platform, Shopify ecommerce stores, and even U.S. government websites. The diversity of affected platforms indicated that the traffic was not targeting specific industries, whether ecommerce, public sector resources, or even paranormal activities, but rather casting a much wider net.
Data Shows Heavy Traffic from Lanzhou and Singapore
The scale of the activity became more apparent through additional data. Over 90 days, 14.7 percent of visitors to U.S. government websites were traced to Lanzhou, China, while 6.6 percent originated from Singapore, according to Wired. Yet the engagement metrics remained consistent: no meaningful interaction and no evidence of human browsing behavior.
Despite the unusual traffic patterns, no direct accusations of wrongdoing have been made. The Chinese bots have not been conclusively linked to cyberattacks, malware distribution, or other overtly malicious actions. Still, the activity’s unexplained nature has created unease among web managers and cybersecurity observers.
One prevailing theory is that the bots may be scraping publicly available data to train artificial intelligence systems. Automated harvesting of online content is common in AI development. However, some experts note that while many companies openly identify and manage such bot activity, ethical disclosures and safeguards may not be uniformly applied across all jurisdictions. The possibility that Chinese bots are collecting content, whether from e-commerce stores or paranormal activities blogsfor AI training remains speculative but widely discussed.
The repeated appearance of Lanzhou as the apparent source has added another layer of mystery. Lanzhou is not widely regarded as a major technology hub and does not host a large concentration of data centers. That inconsistency has led analysts to question whether the location data reflects reality.
Gavin King, founder of web traffic analysis company Known Agents, told Wired that Lanzhou might not be the true origin point. According to King, Google Analytics likely presents Lanzhou as an educated approximation rather than a precise geographic source. What he said he could confirm was that the traffic was consistently routed through Singapore.
Chinese Bots Routed Through Tencent Servers
Although the precise origin remains uncertain, there appears to be a Chinese infrastructure link. King reported that most of the traffic was routed through servers operated by companies belonging to Tencent.
Corroborating that observation, a web portal manager identified as Andy said the bot traffic reaching his website also passed through servers associated with Tencent, Alibaba, and Huawei.
What remains unknown is whether these Chinese bots are operated internally by those companies or by third parties leasing server infrastructure. External clients may be using the servers to distribute automated traffic without direct operational involvement from the companies themselves.
