The China/Singapore Traffic Spike is 100% AI Scraping (Here is the Proof)

byJacobZwack

348 followers

4 weeks ago

I’ve posted about this before, but I wanted to share some actual data that backs up what I’ve been seeing.

Many of us have been skeptical about that wave of "visitors" from China and Singapore, and my firm belief was that these were bots looking for micro-tagging (Schema) and spam/content vulnerabilities.

​It turns out, that intuition was spot on. If you look at the 2025 cybersecurity reports (like the Thales Bad Bot Report or Fastly Threat Insights), the industry is confirming exactly what we are seeing in our analytics.

​Here is the breakdown of why this is happening, based on the actual tech trends:

​1. Singapore is just the "Middleman" (The Hub)

We see "Singapore" in our analytics, but that isn't where the people are. Singapore has become a massive hub for data centers (AWS, DigitalOcean) and VPN exit nodes in Asia.

• ​The Reality: Bots originating in China (or elsewhere) route their traffic through Singapore servers to bypass regional blocks. If you see a spike from Singapore with 0 second engagement, it’s almost certainly a crawler masking its origin.

​2. They ARE looking for "Micro-Tagging" (Schema Markup)

I mentioned before that I thought they were looking for "micro-tagging." In the industry, this is called Schema Scraping.

• ​Why they do it: Bots love structured data (Schema) because it is machine-readable code that tells them exactly what your product is, the price, and the rating without them having to "read" the article. They scrape this to steal your rich snippets or train their own AI models on your data structure.

​3. The "Bump Heads" Factor (LLM Training)

The massive influx isn't just standard crawlers; it's the "AI Arms Race." Companies (like ByteDance/Tencent and others) are scraping the entire web to train their Large Language Models (LLMs).

• ​The Goal: They aren't buying your products. They are scraping your content to teach their AI how to write English. They are essentially "harvesting" our sites for raw data.

​The Bottom Line:

If you are seeing this traffic, don't let it mess with your head or your optimization strategy. It is non-human traffic. My advice? Filter it out of your analytics if you can, or use a firewall like Cloudflare/Wordfence to challenge visitors from those specific regions.

​We aren't crazy—the bots are just aggressive right now.