China Spikes in Views on Blog
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@thelockwoodecho, the increase in traffic, especially to your older posts, suggests it might be due to bots attempting to train AI models.
The best solution is to block third-party and AI training settings as recommended. While not all crawlers will respect this setting, it will prevent a large number from our network of third-party content and research partners from accessing your site. This also adds known AI bots to the “disallow” list in your site’s robots.txt file to prevent them from crawling your site. However, it is up to the AI platforms to honor this request.
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Thankyou for the reply & explanation. Even with that setting, getting a phenomenal increase in visits & visitors, all from China & I know all false readings. To see that someone had read a post used to be one of the thrills of my little venture here, but that’s all spoilt now. I will keep an eye on this thread to see how other people are managing it.
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I switched on the “read” option in WordPress but that’s only going to limit Ai training WordPress is involved in. Most of the Chinese bots seem to be coming from old articles still on Facebook and newer ones on Bluesky. Facebook and BlueSky seem to be opening themselves up for Ai training.
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Hi @thelockwoodecho,
I completely understand your frustration it’s really disheartening when bot traffic overshadows genuine engagement with your content.
As @adetolaadeniran mentioned, enabling the “Prevent third-party sharing” setting is a good first step. Unfortunately, not all bots respect these settings, which is why you’re still seeing the traffic.
Next steps: Since you’re still experiencing high bot traffic even with the preventive settings enabled, I’d recommend opening a support ticket so our team can investigate your specific case and explore additional options that might be available for your site setup.You can open a ticket here: https://wordpress.com/help/contact
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This is pretty common — those spikes from China are usually bot or crawler traffic, not real readers. It doesn’t indicate anything wrong with your site, but you can enable stronger spam protection or use a firewall/CDN to filter automated hits if it keeps happening.
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My traffic is bouncing like a basketball at a Globetrotters game. I’m actually getting more visitors than views. The bots seem to be hitting my site without actually opening anything.
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Since coming back to my blog after a 2 year hiatus, I’ve averaged between 50 to 200 views per month.
Today alone I have 17,000 from 4,500 China ‘visitors’. Mostly on the one same post, which I might make private to see if that curtails things a bit.
It keeps triggering ‘Your stats are booming’ messages from WP.
This month so far, 45,000 views! Hmm, don’t think so!
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Setting that specific post to Private for a few days is the best way to handle this. When the bots hit the link and get an error, they usually stop trying.
Also, our systems are designed to filter out invalid traffic, so you may see those stats corrected retroactively in the coming days.
Let us know if the spike persists!
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I set about 30 posts to private, all of the posts the Chinse bots were slamming. It’s reduced the bot traffic bot only slightly. They’re simply bouncing to new posts. Apparenltly they can get the base url from old social media posts, then crawl the whole site.
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Hello @thelockwoodecho
I understand why seeing that sudden, massive spike in traffic would be alarming, especially when your site is a personal creative space, and you don’t have advanced analytics tools. You’re not alone in this; we’ve seen similar reports from other users, and our developers are already looking into it as part of a broader issue. Please know that this type of traffic does not negatively impact your site or its standing.
If your concern is about AI training or your content being reused without your permission, you can restrict third-party AI access by adjusting your site privacy settings. You’ll find the steps here:
https://wordpress.com/support/privacy-settings/make-your-website-public/#prevent-third-party-sharingEven though the stats may look strange for a little while, your content is safe, and this spike doesn’t mean anything harmful is happening to your site.
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Yes, I am experiencing the same. I too am relieved that I’m not the only one. it is very unnerving though.I noticed that they are scanning every single post going back almost 8 years and obviously with no comments or likes. What could they possibly be looking for on a poetry site?
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Hi there!
I can understand how surprising a sudden spike in traffic can be, especially when it doesn’t line up with your usual engagement.
This type of activity is most often caused by automated bot traffic rather than real visitors. Since your site is publicly accessible, it’s normal to see occasional spikes like this from various regions. The good news is that these spikes are temporary and generally don’t have any negative impact on your site.
Our stats systems are always working to detect and filter out bot activity. They improve continuously over time, but new types of bots appear regularly, so you may still see anomalies like this from time to time. As the system recalibrates, your stats should return to their usual patterns. -
Thank you for your response. I have also checked the sharing with third parties block as suggested on this forum. ☺️
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I noticed that too, just a couple of days ago. Don’t think I’ll ever really trust the stats again, but it was actually a relief to see my normal couple of visits instead of thousands!
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I have found a lot of new subscribers that don’t seem to be really engaging. My spam folder is also filling up. I shut down comments automatically on a post after awhile. They seem to have stopped the massive spidering and crawling and started trying to spam the comments with links.
But I’m also getting no, zero, visters from China so it might be different people. I’m assuming WordPress.com just blacklisted a bunch of Chinese IPs. -
I mean I automatically shut down comments on a post after a week to avoid spammers posting links.
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