Some insights into the popular Singapore bot problem. It looks like they are using Starlink to evade geolocation - Starlink IP for page load (HTML) and later use a set of Alibaba Cloud IPs from Singapore to load every resource listed in that HTML (images, scripts). Blocking Singapore is not enough. It seems like ASN block of entire Starlink could be necessary.

The reason it shows up in GA only as Singapore is because Google Analytics tag is also loaded like all the other scripts, from Singapore cloud, not from Starlink. Starlink is probably used this way by many scraper groups, perhaps xAI too.

Fascinating catch! I was just on CF updating my security rules and noticed that Singapore is now the majority of hits on my CF managed challenges...and for such a tiny country that is def not real traffic. Now I have no idea...I don't want to block all Starlink traffic, perhaps some of it is valid...

India has been out of control in the last month. Changing managed challenge on CF to interactive challenge dropped my India traffic by 53% and still dropping. I have now updated China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Pakistan, Bangladesh to interactive challenge. I don't need or care about traffic from any of these places. CF "managed challenge" is pointless I find, they all get through anyway. Solve the little puzzle kids or f-off entirely from my content.

Not seeing any major drop in traffic here at all, but I am seeing that Google is no longer reporting links like it used to. The overall count has dropped a lot. Also, the types of inquiries coming in are very, very poor quality. Not sure how Google has managed it, but you really get only the leftovers now. People with such low pricing expectations that they must be completely delusional in their thinking. People in Yemen filling in forms in arabic and not making any sense. People asking for free things, or just scammers. We are truly just getting the dreggs.

India has been out of control in the last month.

Apart from the Indian MSFT bot my traffic from there appears as normal which is good for me since we do a lot of business there.

In fact my new measures appeared to be working until late last night when one small site had a big hit from Lithuania, the last time was 7th and 8th Jan for 1100 wp-loin.php brute force requests each and last night was for another 1100+.

I thought I'd locked those down, need to check my coding otherwise, for me, it's looking ok but with an early Easter I do expect February to create an increase in traffic / enquiries.

@Redbar I checked and most of the Indian visits are MSFT bots coming from Indian IP addresses, you are correct. I did some research on the CF site and numerous people are complaining about it. It seems that MSFT cloud services are being used to host scraping bots. I am keeping it blocked for now, even though I don't like blocking Google, MSFT, Amazon IP ranges.

You can sign up for cloudflare and set up rules to deny access to any specific pages. They will never even reach your server nor slow down your site with these brute force hits. The $25 a month is well worth it.

@ichthyous

Unfortunately it is not just Starlink they are using for page downloads. They also use residential proxies/botnets. I banned some dozen of different ISPs in strange African countries where many of their bot nodes were located. But this is an endless whack-a-mole. It's interesting that they decided to load assets (images and scripts) only via Alibaba Cloud. This is what gave their scheme away and I was able to catch loads of their proxy nodes.

It is important to underline that AI companies are criminal entities. They are no different than drug dealers, human traffickers or financial scammers. It would be helpful if society also viewed them as such and they were prosecuted for the harm they are doing.

It is important to underline that AI companies are criminal entities. They are no different than drug dealers, human traffickers or financial scammers. It would be helpful if society also viewed them as such and they were prosecuted for the harm they are doing.

I'm trying to take a more nuanced approach as I am getting more and more traffic from AI sources. But ultimately it's a direct threat at the heard of my business. My work is being rampantly infringed by actual humans, and now used to train AI bots. You can check at haveibeentrained.com to see if your images are being used in datasets. I suspect that with this current 'regime' in the supreme court, congress and white house there will be zero action taken on the copyright infringement front with the AI platforms. It might take years in the USA and will be led by UK/EU/CA/AU first for sure. They no longer have any reason to play ball with USA tech at all since they all got tariffs slapped on them anyway...they will now remove the shackles on going after USA tech.

Worst January in decades. Can't say I am too surprised! Smh!

The month has been a mixed bag on a day-to-day basis, but overall, things are up (especially in the last few days). That's no big surprise, since we usually see growth after the beginning of the year. We're still way down from where we were before AI Overviews came along, though.

The one bright spot is how well affiliate bookings are holding up on our travel-information site. The quantity of Google traffic may be down, but it feels like the quality of that traffic is up (which stands to reason, I guess, since people who want in-depth information from a Web site are likely to be better prospects than people who grab a quick AI answer and disappear).

February 2026 thread here: [webmasterworld.com...]

[edited by: not2easy at 11:47 am (utc) on Feb 11, 2026]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]