Editor’s note updated Feb 13 2026 – China now leads the world in terms of internet users – 1,1 billion, as compared to 806 million users in India and 302 million in the United States. This comes at a time when bots have replaced humans as the #1 source of traffic on the web. In 2025, Cortes Currents received 32,969 visits from Lanzhou, China. The first ‘visitor’ arrived on October 3 and the worst day was December 23 – when 4,105 came. The average bot visit lasts for a fraction of a second, during which they each make numerous requests of the website – sometimes overwhelming the server.

Posted Nov 19, 2025 – There have been numerous reports of cyberattacks, bots, and hackers this month. On November 13, the Wallstreet Journal reported what is reputedly the world’s first cyberespionage operation largely carried out using AI. The makers of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Claude subsequently revealed that they detected this operation in September. The attacks were carried out by Chinese hackers targeting large tech companies, financial institutions, chemical manufacturing companies, and government agencies.

Google Chrome is the world’s most popular browser, holding two-thirds of the market share. Consequently, it is also a frequent target for cyberattacks.

What does this all mean for a tiny website like Cortes Currents, located in a remote corner of British Columbia?

• There are no financial records, donation options, or identities to steal on the website.
• Up until this year, the amount of detectable bot activity was minimal. That changed on October 26.

Since then, there have been 11,8121 visits, with estimates suggesting that more than half of these are not from human users. Notably:

• 5,635 visits came from Lanzhou, China, with an average duration of 1 second.
• 2,616 visits were recorded from Singapore, averaging 5 seconds.
• There were also 1,292 visits lasting 0 seconds from Marshall, United States.

In regard to the change since October, the website’s Analytics noted, “This pattern is most salient in sessions with browser ‘Chrome’ or session source ‘direct’ … The most prominent change came from ‘China’ which increased by 649% week over week.”

While the website often has more than 10,000 visits a month during peak season, these tend to be more spread out. There were 2,017 sessions on November 5 and the vast majority were direct visits through Chrome. On November 14, close to 1,000 visits came from Lanzhou and almost 500 from Singapore. 

In terms of daily operations, the website needs some upgrades and currently cannot handle the volume of bots that periodically descend upon it. When there is excessive traffic, search engines time out before pages can load. So visitors receive a ‘page not found’ message. 

• Approximately 60% of Cortes Currents traffic typically comes from Google searches, with about 25% from visitors accessing the website directly. Due to the recent bot activity, this direct traffic percentage has changed to 89%.

Personally, when I receive notifications that Cortes Currents is unavailable, I just switch to another browser. I’ve never had any problems with DuckDuckGo – which is probably too small to attract the attention Chrome is receiving.

Cortes Currents does not have the time to sift through all the cities listed in the Analytics program to separate human visitors from bots.

We can see that there were more than 2,105 visits from Canada, and since they usually lasted more than two minutes, they are mostly from human users. In contrast, the 5,795 recent visits from China last an average of 1 second, indicating they are likely bots.

They probably are not all ‘bad bots.’ 

There are also ‘good bots,’ which browse the internet to index content for search engines and perform numerous other functions, but if their ‘visits’ come as sudden dumps they are not good.

Cortes Currents has always had some international viewers, but the top three ‘human’ locations have consistently been Vancouver, Greater Campbell River (which includes Cortes and Quadra Islands), and an unspecified rural area that appears as ‘not set.’ There have been 1,612 visits from this area since October 26. That is a bit low, but also in the slack season. Cortes Currents has not been producing as much this year. Never-the-less, if there were 1,600 visits our the target area, the norm would be 6,000ish overall during the past 24 days. 

That’s roughly half the traffic that is coming in.  

Top image credit: Chinese cavalry from the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220 BC) from the Gansu Provincial Museum in Lanzhou.– Photo by Gary Todd via Flickr (Public Domain)

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