A Wave of Unexplained Bot Traffic Is Sweeping the Web
Zeyi Yang
created: Feb. 12, 2026, 7:50 p.m. | updated: Feb. 13, 2026, 2:47 a.m.
When he first noticed the traffic spike, Quintero thought he’d found an audience on the other side of the world.
Google Analytics, a common tool used by website owners to parse web traffic, shows that all the Chinese visitors are from one specific city: Lanzhou.
Website owners who are being targeted have largely concluded that the bots don’t pose any immediate harm.
When website owners saw the sudden uptick of visits from China, many of them started asking, where is Lanzhou?
Andy, the manager of a large weather forecasting website group, says he detected bot traffic coming from ASNs associated with Tencent, Alibaba, and Huawei.
7 hours, 17 minutes ago: WIRED