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The Weekly Blague

All the Bots in China

In December 2025, this website received 1,981 visits from China. And virtually every one was a bot scraping the website for material to train A.I. machines.

 

With apologies to Van Morrison, please do take all the bots in China, put them in a big, brown bag for me, and drop them straight into the deep blue sea.

 

A couple of months ago, I noticed that this website was being swarmed with traffic from China, sometimes more than a hundred visits a day. They were all direct hits; they never stayed on the site for more than a few seconds; and they were systematically going through everything I'd posted since I launched RobertRosenNYC.com in 2010. The overwhelming majority of the hits were coming from one city: Lanzhou.

 

This influx of Chinese traffic so overwhelmed my analytics, it made it next to impossible to figure out what I needed to know: where my real visitors were coming from, how they found the website, and which pages they were going to.

 

So I asked Google what was going on. The visitors, Google said, were bots, and Lanzhou is a Chinese hub of artificial intelligence data centers. The bots are scraping my website and using the material to train their A.I. machines.

 

I tried to set up a filter to block Chinese traffic, but it didn't work.

 

I asked the Authors Guild, who hosts this site, if anything can be done. They're "looking into it," they said.

 

With apologies to Walter Cronkite, that's just the way it is in early 2026, as A.I. attempts to rule the world and bots, Chinese and otherwise, consume every little website to feed the voracious hunger of their large language models.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

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