One interesting thing we've noticed after launching websites on newer, AI-forward platforms: a surprising increase in bot traffic — including large volumes appearing to originate from China.
This isn't necessarily real audience growth.
The web is being crawled more aggressively than ever as AI companies and other automated systems collect and process online content. AI crawlers can generate enormous numbers of requests while sending relatively few actual visitors back to a website.
When analytics start lying
For website owners, there's a practical consequence: your analytics can start telling a misleading story.
A sudden spike in international traffic may look exciting, but if much of it is automated, it can distort pageviews, geographic reports, engagement rates, and other metrics you actually use to make decisions.
You might celebrate a traffic milestone while real human interest hasn't changed at all. Or worse, you might shift strategy based on a region that was never your audience to begin with.
Good analytics now starts with making sure you're measuring the people who actually matter.
Another reason the infrastructure matters
On the sites we manage, this means paying closer attention to traffic at the DNS and security layer — not just inside Google Analytics.
Depending on the business, that can include:
- Identifying and filtering known AI crawlers
- Blocking or challenging suspicious bot traffic
- Geo-blocking regions that have no legitimate reason to access the site
- Maintaining appropriate robots.txt directives
- Protecting legitimate search crawlers so SEO isn't inadvertently affected
Modern services such as Cloudflare now specifically distinguish between Search, Agent, and Training AI crawlers, allowing much more granular control over what gets through.
Geo-blocking alone isn't the complete answer
Bots can operate through infrastructure anywhere in the world. A block focused only on geography will catch some unwanted traffic, but it won't catch everything.
Combined with bot management and sensible firewall rules, though, it can substantially clean up unwanted traffic and restore some sanity to your reports.
“As the web becomes increasingly populated by machines as well as humans, website management has to evolve with it.”