Hundred of visits .. and from dozens of cities
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Why am I getting hundreds of single site visits from dozens of Chinese cities overnight?
WordPress, what is happening here?The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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One of my sites (bwspotlight.com) is getting a ton of reads from the United States that doesn’t match up to my visitor count. Maybe it’s a glitch?
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I would hate to alarm the experts in WordPress, who are careful of their protections of their paying contributors .. but seriously folks, what is going wrong here? .. My China city numbers are now beyond belief .. just as well I’m not depending on your stats for belief in my numbers. And a pity too if anyone else is being subject to what can only be believed as phony visits when they think their sites, if similarly effected, give phony stats.
Please try and get back to me ASAP.
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Hi @peterbowes this is alarming to see but I can reassure you: your site is fine, and these are not real visitors.
What you’re looking at is a well-documented wave of AI scraper and crawler bot traffic that has been hitting English-language blogs heavily since around October 2025. These bots scan websites at scale to harvest content for AI model training, and they often operate from large distributed networks of Chinese IP addresses spanning many cities. The “hundreds of visits from dozens of cities overnight” pattern is exactly what this looks like in Jetpack Stats.
The tell-tale signs are always the same: near-zero time on page, 100% bounce rate, no comments, no likes, no follows, and the same posts getting hit repeatedly. If you look at your stats for those visits, that is almost certainly what you will see.
What this means for your site
The bots are not damaging anything. They are not accessing your account, they are not a security threat, and they will not affect your search rankings. The only real problem is that they pollute your stats and make it harder to see how many genuine readers you are getting.
What you can do on WordPress.com
Go to your dashboard, then Settings > General, and look for the “Prevent third-party sharing” toggle. Turning this on signals to WordPress.com’s partner network that you do not want your content shared with third parties including AI platforms. It will not stop all scrapers immediately — bots that ignore signals will keep hitting the site — but it is the right setting to have on and some users have reported a reduction after enabling it.
Beyond that, the controls available on WordPress.com for blocking specific countries or IPs are limited compared to self-hosted WordPress. The main thing Jetpack Stats can do is filter out known bots over time as their patterns are identified. When looking at your stats, focus on trends over weeks rather than daily spikes, and look at engagement metrics (comments, likes, email subscribers) as your real measure of audience since bots cannot fake those.
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Sometime last night the numbers started reflecting reads (though the old numbers are still there from that morning), and today the stats at least appear to sync up better between reads and views. So hopefully this is all dealt with and none of us will deal with this anymore.
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