Anyone else had a sudden and massive rise in visitors and views?
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Wired cottoned on and published a good article about this. WordPress are not the only site to experience the traffic surges, apparently originating from Langzhou in China. https://www.wired.com/story/made-in-china-niche-websites-are-seeing-a-surge-of-mysterious-traffic-from-china/#intcid=_wired-verso-hp-trending_783b3eaa-793e-43ad-b7bc-2c500b49409b_popular4-2
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I just want to clarify something you said for people who are just now reading this . . . If you read previous posts, you’ll see I use Google Analytics and ClustrMaps. Like WP’s stats, they also showed the same jumps. All three dropped around the same time.
Today, this is Google Analytic’s stats:
The point I’m trying to make is that telling users to use a different stats host just generates more work for them and doesn’t solve anything, since it will likely show them the same thing. Although ClustrMaps currently shows more realistic numbers.
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Between the end of December 2025, when China dropped down to zero, and Thursday, February 12th, the day before China came back online, I was getting a more modest multiple of what I consider my regular views, almost all from the US.
Meaning that instead of my usual (pre Nov 2025) traffic of 30 to 40 daily visitors, since the beginning of January, I was getting from 600 to sometimes 3K views per day . . . until two days agoe, when China came back online. I’m now up to 60K per day . . . but I’m still getting about 2.5K from the US, likely all but a handful being bots.
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I’ve got exactly the same problem – views and visitors both up gradually from around a hundred a few days ago to several thousand yesterday. And then, suddenly at 1am, the numbers are back to a handful. Overwhelmingly the huge numbers are from the USA – thousands – with just a few tens extra from UK and Australia. Oddly, posts which were previously most popular are getting the lions share of the supposed increase.
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Hello there,
I am sorry to hear that you are seeing all of these different stats appearing. Unfortunately, this is something we do see across the web more broadly.
Much like every other platform, we are constantly filtering against spammers and automated visitors. The rate at which these systems evolve means it is effectively a race, with their innovation moving rapidly.
While WordPress.com uses some of the more advanced filtering systems available, the pace of change online makes this an ongoing challenge. Without these systems in place, you would see inflated numbers appearing across the board. We are able to filter out the vast majority, but from time to time, you may still notice this kind of activity sadly.
It is always worth checking your plugins to make sure there are no vulnerabilities, and also confirming that no one else has access to your account.
But, what typically happens is that you will see a blip in the figures, sometimes a noticeable one, and it takes a little time for our systems to learn that pattern and block it, as well as any follow up attempts. We are continually working to improve this of course.
Because of this, the best way to look at stats is perhaps to see them as a trend indicator over time.
I hope this at least provides some more context. -
I’ve received over 84,000 views (59,000 visitors) since January 1st. 56,000 are from North Bergen, NJ! Homegrown bots.
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I know it a bit older post but I had regular views from US in the past some weeks (Jan and Febr. 2026) that were suspicious. It would be good to see the real statistics without bots. My blog is in Hungarian. I know I could have had some views from Europe, but very rarely from the USA as my content is in Hungarian and I have just a couple friends there. I am almost sure noone else knows about my blog there.
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I’m in the US, and since November I’ve received well over 500K views from Asia (mainly China, but surrounding countries as well), I at best, I “know” one user from the area.
Yes, it would be nice if bots were filtered. They had been before the advent of AI. Unfortunately, AI bots now seem to be able to circumvent filters.
Even when the filters adapt, new AI bots bypass them. An ongoing war, if you will.
I think this will be the state of things from now on, where views and visits numbers will essentially be meaningless.
Your best hope is that users engage via likes or, preferably, comments, and you ignore other stats.
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