Why Your Site Is Getting Flooded with Bot Traffic from China and Singapore

If you've checked your analytics recently, whether that's Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Mixpanel, or even your ad platform dashboards—you may have noticed something strange. Traffic from China and Singapore has exploded. Sessions are up. Pageviews are climbing. At first glance, it looks like you've cracked the Asian market without even trying.

Then you look closer: 100% bounce rates. Zero-second sessions. No conversions. No form fills. No purchases. Nothing.

These aren't customers. They're bots—and since September 2025, they've been hitting websites worldwide at an unprecedented scale. This isn't just an analytics annoyance. It's polluting marketing data across every platform, distorting ad performance metrics, and causing real business damage.

What's Actually Happening

Starting in mid-September 2025, a massive wave of automated traffic began flooding websites globally. Security researchers and analytics users worldwide have confirmed this highly specific pattern. The pattern is consistent: traffic originates primarily from Lanzhou (China) and Singapore, shows up as "direct" visits with no referrer, and exhibits zero meaningful engagement.

What makes this wave different from typical bot traffic is its sophistication. These aren't clumsy scrapers that trip security filters. Many of these bots send measurement calls directly to analytics platforms without fully loading web pages, creating "ghost sessions" that appear in your dashboards but never actually touched your server. Others execute JavaScript, trigger pixels, and mimic human browsing patterns just enough to slip through standard bot detection.

The result is that this traffic shows up everywhere: in your web analytics, in your ad platform reports, in your CRM attribution data. It's polluting the entire marketing data ecosystem.

The Telltale Signs

This bot traffic follows a consistent, identifiable pattern across platforms:

Geographic origin: Primarily Lanzhou (China) and Singapore, with secondary traffic from Ashburn, Virginia and other data center hubs.
Session behavior: 0-1 second duration, single page views, 99-100% bounce rate.
Traffic source: Appears as "direct" or "(not set)" with no referrer information.
Device fingerprint: Often Windows 7 with screen resolutions of 1280×1200 or 3840×2160—device profiles that are statistically uncommon for real users.
Engagement: Zero scroll depth, zero clicks, zero conversions.
Timing pattern: Often arrives in regular intervals—pairs of sessions every hour, or bursts at predictable times.

Why This Is Happening Now

The timing of this surge isn't random. It coincides with the rapid expansion of Chinese AI companies and their large language models. Companies like Alibaba (Qwen), DeepSeek, and others are scaling up aggressively, and training competitive AI models requires massive amounts of web data.

Singapore appears prominently in this traffic because it's a major data center hub and VPN exit point. Its infrastructure is fast, its connectivity to both Asian and Western networks is excellent, and it provides a convenient proxy location for operations that might face restrictions if run directly from mainland China.

The Real Damage to Your Marketing

"It's just noise in my analytics" is the common dismissal. But the downstream effects are more serious than most marketers realize.

Your KPIs Are Now Unreliable: Your conversion rate craters—not because your marketing stopped working, but because the denominator is stuffed with fake sessions.
Ad Platform Algorithms Get Poisoned: This is where it gets expensive. When bot traffic pollutes your conversion signal, bidding algorithms learn the wrong patterns. They optimize to find more traffic that looks like bots, leading to a negative feedback loop that drains your budget.
Attribution Models Fall Apart: Bot sessions inject noise into the customer path, causing attribution models to assign credit incorrectly. Budget flows to the wrong channels.
Stakeholder Trust Erodes: Unexplained data anomalies are credibility killers. When traffic jumps 300% overnight with zero business impact, every number you present becomes suspect.

How to Protect Your Data

There's no single fix that eliminates this problem entirely, but a layered defense can dramatically reduce the impact.

Block at the Edge

If you use Cloudflare, Akamai, or another CDN/WAF, set up firewall rules targeting traffic from China (CN) and Singapore (SG), along with specific ASNs (113220, 113203, 45899 are known sources). Enable bot fight mode if available.

Caveat: Edge blocking stops bots that actually load your pages, but it won't catch ghost sessions that send measurement calls directly to analytics platforms without hitting your server.

Filter in Your Analytics Platform

Create segments or filters that exclude the bot traffic pattern: sessions from China and Singapore with engagement time under 10 seconds and bounce rates near 100%. Apply these when analyzing data to see your real performance.

Go Beyond Manual: Real-Time Traffic Verification (The Hyperguard Difference)

Manual blocks via Cloudflare and filtering in GA4 are essential first steps, but they cannot keep up with this dynamic threat. This is why a real-time behavioral defense is needed:

Automates Exclusion: Instead of manually tracking new ASNs and updating firewall rules weekly, Hyperguard automatically adapts to bot networks that constantly rotate their IPs and device fingerprints.
Cleans the Source: The system blocks malicious traffic before it can fire your Google Ads, Meta, or TikTok pixels, ensuring your multi-million dollar bidding algorithms learn only from verified human interactions.

Cross-Reference with Server Logs

Compare your analytics data against server logs or CDN logs. If sessions appear in your analytics but not in your server logs, you've confirmed ghost traffic.

Monitor Your Ad Platforms Separately

Check geographic breakdowns in Google Ads, Meta Ads Manager, and other platforms. Look for unusual spikes in impressions or clicks from regions you don't target.

Establish Ongoing Hygiene

This isn't a set-and-forget fix. Bot networks constantly evolve. Build regular monitoring into your workflow: review traffic by geography for new anomalies; audit your filtering logic.

The Bigger Picture

This China/Singapore bot surge is a symptom of a much larger shift. Over 47% of internet traffic is now automated, and that number is growing. The assumption that "a visit equals a person" no longer holds. The days of trusting raw analytics data at face value are over.

The marketers who thrive in this environment will be those who treat data quality as infrastructure—who invest in identifying invalid traffic, filtering it out, and building their strategies on verified human behavior rather than polluted totals.

Clean data isn't just a nice-to-have anymore. It's a competitive advantage.

What You Should Do Right Now

If you haven't already, take these steps this week:

Check your analytics for traffic spikes from China and Singapore over the past 90 days.
Look at engagement metrics for that traffic—if it's near-zero engagement with 100% bounce, you've been hit.
Set up exclusion filters to clean your reporting.
Implement edge blocking if you have a WAF/CDN.
Review your ad platform data for similar patterns.

The bot traffic problem isn't going away. If anything, it's accelerating as AI development intensifies globally. The question isn't whether you'll deal with invalid traffic—it's whether you'll deal with it proactively or let it quietly corrupt your marketing decisions.

Want to see how much invalid traffic is really hitting your campaigns? Hyperguard automatically detects and filters bot traffic across your paid media, giving you clean data you can actually trust. Stop making decisions on polluted metrics and eliminate the risk of algorithm poisoning today.