The AI Bot Problem: A Growing Concern for Website Owners

The rise of AI bots is changing the way we interact with the web, but it's also creating new challenges for website owners.

TL;DR
• AI bots are now a significant source of web traffic.
• They are causing problems for website owners, including distorted data and increased costs.
• Website owners are taking matters into their own hands, using makeshift solutions to block the bots.

Summary
A recent surge in bot traffic from China and Singapore has been observed across various websites, including those of US government agencies, ecommerce shops, and personal portfolio sites. The bots, which are linked to major Chinese cloud companies such as Tencent, Alibaba, and Huawei, appear to be harvesting web data for training AI models.

Key insights include:
• The bots are disguising themselves as normal human users from Lanzhou, China, and Singapore, making them difficult to detect and block.
• They are bypassing common bot-blocking rules and skewing website analytics, leading to distorted reports on visitor traffic.
• The surge in bot traffic has resulted in increased costs for website owners, who are being forced to pay more for bandwidth and invest in sophisticated prevention tools.
• Some website owners are taking matters into their own hands by blocking IP addresses from China and Singapore or using makeshift strategies to identify and block the bots.

The bot traffic is significant, with 14.7% of visits to US government websites coming from Lanzhou and 6.6% from Singapore. Website owners are concerned about the impact on their ad revenue and the potential for copyrighted material to be scanned without permission.

The lack of clear motive behind the bots adds to the confusion, with some speculating that they may be part of an AI company's effort to collect training data. As autonomous AI tools proliferate across the internet, website owners are likely to face more headaches in combating them.

As AI continues to evolve, it's essential for website owners to stay ahead of the game and find ways to combat these bots.