Something Weird is Happening on WordPress

On By EclecticMusicLoverIn Commentary

I’ve been blogging about music for ten years, and though my output has diminished from what it was during my peak years of 2017-2022 – to the point where I’m now generally posting only once a week – my readership has gradually increased, probably due in large part to the fact I now have an accumulated back catalog of nearly 2,000 posts. But I’ve recently noticed a significant uptick in daily views of my blog, from an average of 300-400 per day to well over 1,000 per day.

At first, I was elated by these stats, thinking that my blog had finally broken through the clutter and was getting more notice in the search engines (I do not pay for search engine optimization of any kind). But after checking the origins of my views by country, I was alarmed to see that 70-75% of my recent views are coming from China! Over the past ten years, the vast majority of my views have come from the U.S., as expected, followed by a much smaller but sizable number from the UK, Canada, Australia, India and Germany, in that order. For 2023, China came in 19th, with only 0.45% of the total views for that year, while last year it ranked #18 with only 0.37% of the total.

While I’m thrilled that so many Chinese people appear to suddenly be flocking to my little music blog, I can’t help but think these numbers aren’t legit, and may simply be bots or some other nefarious activity. Has anyone else noticed a sudden uptick in traffic to their blogs?

41 thoughts on “Something Weird is Happening on WordPress”

    1. Ralph Beauchamp's avatar Ralph Beauchamp

      I also have a large Asian readership primarily in India and Pakistan but that is due to taking Facebook and Instagram ads that target quite a few countries. Outside of the US, I’ve noticed that a good percentage of hits come more from Asia than anywhere else. I think they are musically starved and appreciate hearing new artists. One post had over 5000 hits from India alone.

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  5. While certainly not near those numbers my #2 for the month is China, while YTD it’s at #10 and last year did not crack the top 25. China likes to gather information as we know, but I think Leon is on to something with AI. Which clearly means that your brain is of interest to AI bots, and so it should!

    Liked by 1 person

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  6. Hm, that’s interesting. I just checked my blog for different time periods. To start with, my traffic numbers are much smaller than yours. Overall, the top distribution of traffic has been fairly stable, with the most traffic by far coming from the U.S., followed by the UK and Canada. By comparison, China barely registers – yet.

    That said, the relative share of traffic from China has steadily risen from 0.07% for the past year, to 0.3% for the past quarter, to 0.7% for the past 30 days, to 2.7% for the past 7 days. Perhaps, they eventually will catch up with the top 3.

    I also could see the inclusion of our content in AI bots as a driver.

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  10. I’m guessing they’re “bots,” or something similarly illegitimate. I’ve been blogging for 13 years and used to view my stats, but I realized I have minimal control, and these days pay no attention to them. I figure my audience are those who comment, and those who “like.” (And hopefully they’ve actually read my shit!) There’s just way too much cyber-junk out there.

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  12. Yes, same thing happening at my place! I wrote about it a few days ago, a slowly increasing series of visits from numerous IPs in China. I don’t know for sure what’s happening, but I suspect an AI agent may be looking for learning material.

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      1. H.G.O's avatar H.G.O

        It just occurred to me that it could be bots scraping content from the web to train their LLM (AI) models (there are many Chinese tech firms developing their own models).

        Liked by 1 person

  17. Hi there! I am having the very same thing happen to me. My site views nearly triple every Thursday (not sure why it happens on that day but it sure does). The increase in traffic is almost exclusively from China. My thought was the same as has been mentioned and that is that my posts are being combed for information, word usage, writing style and so on for AI purposes. Thanks for bringing this up. I guess we are all in this together….whatever this happens to be.

    Liked by 1 person

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      1. I have been poking around in my security settings and am being told that my site is functioning normally and is operationally stable. I am no techspert so I will have to trust in the security features I have. Good luck on your end. If anything changes please feel free to reach out and vice versa.

        Liked by 1 person

  18. You know, the same thing has been happening to me. All of a sudden I’m getting all these views from China, and I know it’s not because the Chinese are suddenly enthralled with my little old blog. I figured whatever it is, it can’t be good.

    I did a search for “why is my blog suddenly getting so many views from China,” and your blog popped up. So did some Reddit-type threads. What I learned is that it’s some combo of bots, referrer spam and “vulnerability scanners” looking for security weaknesses in computer systems, networks, etc.

    So yeah, not good….

    Thanks for sharing your experience. Definitely an alarm bell going off.

    Liked by 1 person

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  19. Just saw this post from a search I did about increases in views on WordPress from China! The last couple days have been insane with my little music blog. Used to be that 75 to 100 views was what I’d get. Then the last couple of weeks it’s been going up from 100 to 200 views. Yesterday I had a staggering 853 views, and at noon today I’m already at 679! And the bulk of views from the last 48 hours were from China.

    The AI theory seems to makes sense. Either that or I’m going becoming the Lester Bangs of music writers for China. Either way, it’s been a wacky of couple days.

    Liked by 1 person

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  20. Similar experience with me, too! Since last month, the number of visitors to my blog has increased abruptly from 200–250 to more than 2,000 per day, with 80–55% originating from China. After reviewing Google Analytics, it appears that AI crawlers, rather than hackers, are responsible for the rise. Nevertheless, I can’t help but question—are any of these visitors genuine readers?

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  21. Pingback: A Warm Greeting To My Hundreds Of New Readers from China – Vance Cariaga

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