So you don’t manage a site with any social media component? I don’t think the bots that were crawling your site are the same ones people are saying disappeared from sites like twitter.
It’s not very surprising that banning all Russian traffic resulted in most of that traffic moving to a VPN; that’s the primary method of circumventing geofencing.
Yeah, and how exactly do you know that was social media troll bots and not like AI training spiders? Do you handle cybersecurity for twitter?
Nothing there is contradictory. People on twitter anecdotally think there are fewer bot replies and try to prove it, erroneously, with charts from cloudflare showing that traffic that self identifies as bot traffic because it’s from fucking search engine spiders is down.
I can see how this would be confusing if you had no idea what those charts meant and were just looking to confirm an existing bias, though.
Bot traffic is down: meaning the bots that Yandex used to index webpages for their search engine. The article doesn’t take very long to make that point; you could have just skimmed it to see that (I did).
So it’s true, but not in the way people mean it when they say “all the russian bots are gone!”.
Should I put any effort at all into finding out what kind of toys my children like? No I’ll just ask a glorified autocomplete to do the equivalent of typing “top 5 Star Wars Lego sets” into google and buying everything from first Reddit thread it spits out.
Yeah I suspect the traffic did drop when Yandex’s spiders and all the colocated AI systems stopped crawling your site; data from cloudflare confirms this. It’s not a coincidence; it’s just not what people are claiming it is. You’d probably see a similar drop if someone bombed data centers in the US, but that doesn’t mean they’re running social media troll bots. AI bots are responsible for a lot of traffic these days.
Do you have any information on what user agent strings the suspicious traffic was using? Yandex bots might still use their user agent string even if they were crawling through a VPN. AI bots would probably masquerade as a standard browser, but would be likely try to crawl your entire site unlike natural traffic visiting a few pages. With VPNs in play it’s too difficult to say for sure, though.