I have a website, Rob Wigley Music. I've had it since March, 2021. It's not visited all that often, but I still monitor visits as that's easy to do with squarespace. For about the past 18 months I've had thousands of visits mainly from China. They aren't "fans", as the bounce rate is 100%. They will hit one of my pages and then be gone. There's no other possibility other than scraping websites for AI. My wife chooses to think there's a legion of "fans" out there, but the reality is they're just pretty much stealing my content to (most likely) educate their AI models. It sort of pisses me off, but I'm told the only way to stop it is to remove my site from Google, which I won't do. Ah well, current rant finished.

Scraping of sites has been a thing since search engines and cached/archived webpages have been around. It may be more prevalent with AI's upswing, but it's not new.

I think, if I were in your position, I might "poison" the site for AI. Put some nonsense and/or contradictory content on the page, perhaps hidden from non-bot browsers. Hidden links to conspiracy sites, sketchy porn, phone numbers/e-mail addresses of LE agencies, etc. Of course, you'd include fake glowing reviews of your music as well. Raise enough flags in their content verification algorithms that they stop visiting.

From June 4, 2026

quote:

Bot web traffic has overtaken human web traffic, data shows

Bot web traffic has overtaken human web traffic, data shows

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/t...ata-shows-rcna348522

I have two sites that I manage, both were effectively DDOS'd with several thousand "bots" (guest appearing requests).
And thousands of spam registered accounts.

I was able to mitigate it, but it took several days and it takes continual minor maintenance to stay just slightly behind.

A few bots follow the "rules", but more than 99% of the traffic scraping does not, and "AI" is money. And there is a ton of money in Learing Centers scraping content to feed this monster.

If I could keep bees, I would in a heartbeat, and do it for free or might even pay my way.

-botkillermonkey

Google doesn't offer any Geoblocking security features? For example, my business only does business in the USA>. So I block all other countries (with a few minor, specific exceptions) to reduce threat surface. We can still be attacked from someone bouncing through a U.S. host, but most IPs on the planet can't even see us.

If you're that concerned, check your referrer log. Or set one up if you don't have it already.