A Final Diary Note, an Investigation, and Where My Diary Continues
For years, I used this WordPress blog for something very simple and personal:
my diary.
I wrote about whatever interested me.
Technology. Language. Products. Places. Questions that crossed my mind. Things I learned. Practical problems. Personal observations. News. Science. The Netherlands. Mexico. Animals. Mobile phones. Artificial Intelligence (AI, inteligencia artificial: computer systems that can perform tasks connected with language, images, reasoning, prediction, or other forms of information processing).
There was never a rule saying that all these subjects had to fit into one commercial niche.
They belonged together because they were things I wanted to write about.
That is what a diary can be.
Then something happened that changed my relationship with WordPress.
1. Why I Moved My Diary Away From WordPress
At one point, WordPress classified my site as spam and closed it.
I later recovered access, but the experience left me with an uncomfortable question:
What would happen to years of writing if one platform became the only place where my diary existed?
A publishing platform can be useful, but it is still a platform controlled by somebody else. I did not want the continued existence of my personal archive to depend completely on one company and one account.
So I changed the way I preserve my diary.
Google Drive became the primary place where I continue it.
This WordPress site remains online as an archive of what I published here, but the diary itself continues elsewhere.
My continuing public diary can be found here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1WZIeL2yzkc6k3mgeyBjZF-kV64jZWhjf
That link, however, is not the whole reason for this final diary note.
Something strange happened after I had largely stopped using the site.
And I wanted to understand it.
2. The Unexpected Visitors From China
In 2026, I looked at the statistics for this old WordPress diary.
One country immediately caught my attention.
The recorded views included:
- United States — 710
- China — 339
- Netherlands — 188
- Mexico — 74
- Spain — 66
- Hong Kong — 60
China was therefore one of the largest recorded sources of views.
China is a large country in East Asia. It borders countries including Mongolia, Russia, India, Nepal, Vietnam and others, and its eastern coast faces the Pacific Ocean through seas including the East China Sea and South China Sea.
I had not been trying to build a Chinese audience.
The blog contains mainly English and Spanish material and covers a very large number of unrelated subjects.
The Netherlands, another country appearing prominently in my statistics, is in northwestern Europe beside the North Sea, bordering Germany and Belgium. Mexico is in the southern part of North America, between the United States and Guatemala and Belize, with coasts on the Pacific Ocean, Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea.
Those countries made sense in the history of my writing.
China was different.
So I asked a simple question:
Why was an old personal diary receiving hundreds of views attributed to China?
I began investigating.
3. First Idea: Had One of My Articles Become Popular in China?
The most exciting explanation was also the most obvious.
Perhaps somebody in China had discovered one of my articles.
Perhaps the article had been shared on a website, forum, social network, search engine, or another online service.
Hundreds of people might then have followed the link.
But the statistics created a problem for that explanation.
3.1 The traffic was spread across many pages
The traffic did not appear as one spectacular article receiving hundreds of views.
Instead, WordPress showed views spread across a very large number of pages.
The statistics included:
- Home Page / Archives — 456 views
- individual articles with 51, 50, 45, 36, 34, 33 and 29 views
- many more articles with smaller numbers such as 20, 17, 16, 14, 13, 12, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4 and 3 views
The subjects were extremely varied.
There were articles about Mars, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, KPN, supermarkets, electricity, Estonia, the Netherlands, hotels, animals, dolphins, ants, medicines, language, etymology, religion, technology, mobile phones, work, products and many other subjects.
The pages also came from different years, including material published in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2024, 2025 and 2026.
That pattern did not prove anything by itself.
But it gave me another explanation to investigate:
automated crawling.
3.2 What is an automated crawler?
A crawler is a computer program that automatically visits web pages.
It may open one page, find links there, follow those links, discover more pages and continue through a website.
A simplified journey could look like this:
Archive → Article A → Article B → older archive → Article C → Article D
A human visitor normally chooses pages because something interests him.
A crawler does not need to be personally interested in Mars, dolphins, supermarkets, Dutch administration and mobile phones at the same time.
It can simply collect or examine pages.
That made the strange variety of visited material easier to understand.
But it was still only an interpretation.
It was not proof.
4. The Referrers Made the Mystery More Interesting
I then examined another part of the statistics: referrers.
A referrer is information that can tell a website that somebody arrived after following a link from another website or service.
Jetpack’s official documentation explains that a view can be associated with a referrer when somebody clicks a link from another site or search service. It also warns that referrer totals do not necessarily equal total views. A person may arrive directly, through email, through an application, or through a browser that does not provide complete referrer information. (jetpack.com)
My 2026 statistics showed approximately:
- Search engines — 382 views
- Google.com — 363
- Perplexity — 10
- ChatGPT.com — 32
- WordPress Reader — 4
- statics.teams.cdn.office.net — 4
- Quora — 3
- Claude — 1
- Meltwater — 1
There were also very small numbers from other search services.
This was interesting for another reason.
My old diary was still being discovered through modern search and Artificial Intelligence services.
But there was something I did not see:
a large Chinese referrer that clearly explained 339 views.
I did not find a visible large Baidu referral or one obvious Chinese website sending hundreds of clicks.
That does not prove that no such source existed. Referrer data can be incomplete. Jetpack specifically explains that browser and search-engine privacy changes may prevent some referrer information from reaching its statistics. (jetpack.com)
So the correct conclusion is limited:
I did not find a visible referrer in my available statistics that explained the Chinese traffic as hundreds of ordinary clicks from one Chinese source.
5. A Very Important Limitation: The Numbers Cannot Simply Be Joined
This is where it becomes especially important to separate evidence from imagination.
WordPress showed:
China — 339 views
and, separately:
Google.com — 363 referrals
The numbers are interestingly close.
But that does not demonstrate:
339 Chinese views = 339 Google referrals.
The statistics shown to me did not provide the evidence needed to connect those two numbers request by request.
The same problem applies to the pages.
I could see which pages received views.
I could see country totals.
I could see referrer totals.
But from the information available to me, I could not truthfully reconstruct every individual visit and say:
“This exact page view came from this exact country through this exact referrer.”
Jetpack itself collects technical information for its statistics, including Internet Protocol addresses, visiting URLs, referring URLs, timestamps, user-agent information and country codes. An Internet Protocol address (IP address, dirección de Protocolo de Internet) is a numerical network address used in Internet communication.
However, Jetpack’s privacy documentation says that the site owner does not receive access through the Stats feature to the individual visitor information behind those records. It also says that Stats logs containing visitor IP addresses are retained by Automattic for 28 days for the purpose of operating the feature. (jetpack.com)
That creates a clear limit.
Historical dashboard totals are not the same thing as complete server-level evidence.
6. Then I Found a Much Bigger Story
The investigation became much more interesting when I discovered that other website owners had reported a strikingly similar phenomenon.
On February 12, 2026, WIRED published an investigation titled:
“A Wave of Unexplained Bot Traffic Is Sweeping the Web.”
WIRED reported unusual automated traffic connected with Internet Protocol addresses attributed to China and Singapore. Reports had begun around September 2025 and affected many different kinds of websites, including small personal sites, publishers, online shops, a weather platform and United States government domains. (wired.com)
One story sounded especially familiar.
A website owner named Alejandro Quintero saw so much traffic from China that he first wondered whether he had suddenly developed a Chinese audience.
After examining his analytics, he concluded that the activity was automated rather than normal human reading. WIRED reported that the visitors showed behavior such as zero-second average engagement and no scrolling or clicking. (wired.com)
My statistics do not contain the same detailed evidence about my own 339 Chinese views.
So Quintero’s case does not prove what happened on my blog.
But it demonstrates that the strange idea I was investigating was not unique.
Other website owners really were seeing large amounts of unusual traffic attributed to China during the same wider period.
6.1 Why Lanzhou appeared in the investigation
WIRED also discussed traffic attributed to Lanzhou.
Lanzhou is a city in northwestern China and the capital of Gansu Province. China itself is in East Asia, with the Pacific Ocean to its east.
However, the geographical label was not necessarily proof that the computers controlling the activity were physically located in Lanzhou.
The WIRED investigation explained that geolocation can be imperfect and that some traffic was routed through cloud infrastructure. (wired.com)
This distinction is important.
A location shown by an analytics system is evidence about how traffic was classified.
It is not automatically proof of the real physical location of the person or system controlling it.
6.2 Tencent, Alibaba and Huawei
WIRED reported traffic connected with Autonomous System Numbers (ASN, números de sistema autónomo) associated with cloud networks operated by companies including Tencent, Alibaba and Huawei.
An Autonomous System Number is an identifier used for a large network that participates in Internet routing.
One expert cited by WIRED found traffic connected with ASN 132203, assigned to a network operated by Tencent. Another website operator reported suspicious traffic through networks associated with Tencent, Alibaba and Huawei. (wired.com)
This does not establish that Tencent, Alibaba or Huawei operated the bots.
Cloud companies provide infrastructure that can be used by customers.
Finding traffic on a company’s network and identifying the person or organization controlling the software are two different things.
WIRED explicitly reported that the final operator and purpose remained unclear. (wired.com)
7. But Doesn’t Jetpack Filter Bots?
Yes, some automated traffic is filtered.
But that statement needs careful wording.
Jetpack says that its statistics do not count visits from Googlebot and certain other search-engine spiders. It also says that different analytics systems can produce different numbers because they make different decisions about what traffic to count. (jetpack.com)
A spider is another name for an automated crawler.
This means that a familiar, clearly identified search-engine crawler may be excluded.
It does not give me evidence that every remaining recorded visit must therefore have come from a human being.
WIRED’s 2026 investigation adds an important piece of context. Several website operators and specialists reported bots that presented themselves in ways designed to look more like ordinary human browser traffic. The article says some of the unusual bots could bypass common bot-blocking methods. (wired.com)
That makes the situation more complicated than:
bot = automatically invisible in statistics
and
visible statistic = definitely human.
Modern automated traffic does not always identify itself clearly.
8. Could Artificial Intelligence Be Behind the Chinese Traffic?
It could be one explanation.
But I do not have evidence that allows me to state that it was the explanation for my 339 Chinese views.
WIRED reported that some website owners suspected Artificial Intelligence data collection because automated AI-related crawling had become an important part of web traffic.
But the investigation did not identify the operator of the unexplained wave or establish its purpose. Other explanations for automated collection also exist, including search indexing and commercial data collection. (wired.com)
That is why I should not write:
“An AI company in China collected my diary.”
I cannot prove that.
Possible purposes for a crawler can include:
- search indexing
- classification
- data collection
- information retrieval
- research
- dataset construction
- automated monitoring
- security-related scanning
- other forms of web analysis
Without knowing who operated the system, its real purpose remains unconfirmed.
8.1 Why would a machine visit a personal diary?
Perhaps the word interested creates the wrong mental picture.
A machine does not need to enjoy a diary.
My site contains years of public text.
It has archives.
It has descriptive titles.
Many posts answer specific questions.
Some subjects are common and others are unusual.
Pages are connected by links.
For a human reader, the combination may look chaotic because there is no single subject.
For an automated system, it may simply look like:
hundreds of accessible documents.
And accessible documents can be discovered, indexed, classified or collected without any emotional interest in the writer.
9. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude Are a Separate Story
My statistics also showed referrals associated with ChatGPT.com, Perplexity and Claude.
Those numbers are interesting, but they should not be confused with the mysterious Chinese traffic.
A referral means that a visit was associated with a link from that service according to the available statistics.
It does not demonstrate that a crawler belonging to that company created the visit.
A human clicking a link shown by an Artificial Intelligence service and an automated crawler collecting a page are different events.
So I have evidence for this statement:
My WordPress statistics recorded referrals associated with ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude.
I do not have evidence for this one:
ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude generated the 339 Chinese views.
Those claims must remain separate.
Still, I find the referrals fascinating.
Some of these diary entries were written before today’s Artificial Intelligence services became such an important way of discovering information.
Years later, old pages can still enter new information systems and lead new readers back to the archive.
10. What Can I Actually Conclude?
After looking at my statistics and comparing them with the wider 2025–2026 phenomenon documented by WIRED, I can make several careful conclusions.
There is no evidence in the statistics available to me that 339 individual human readers in China independently discovered and carefully read my diary.
I did not find evidence of one article becoming massively viral in China.
I did not find one visible Chinese referrer that clearly accounted for hundreds of readers.
The broad spread across old and new pages on many unrelated subjects is compatible with automated exploration.
The documented wave of unusual automated traffic attributed to infrastructure in China during 2025 and 2026 makes that interpretation more credible. (wired.com)
But I am missing the technical evidence needed to identify each of those 339 views.
I do not have historical request-level access to all the original IP addresses, exact timestamps, user-agent strings, requested URLs and network information for those individual visits.
Therefore I cannot responsibly say:
“I proved that all 339 Chinese views were bots.”
I did not.
The more accurate conclusion is:
The evidence points mainly toward automated traffic, but the WordPress statistics available to me are not sufficient to identify every one of the 339 Chinese views conclusively.
That difference matters.
11. Did the Machines Make Me Famous?
Not really.
Three hundred automated page requests are not the same thing as three hundred human readers.
A crawler can create impressive-looking statistics without creating a human audience.
But machine discovery is still interesting.
It means that public material can continue moving through the information systems of the Internet long after the writer has stopped actively promoting it.
Search engines can index old pages.
Automated systems can find them.
Artificial Intelligence services can direct human users toward public pages.
And those processes can later produce real human discovery.
Machine visibility and human recognition are not the same thing.
But on the modern Internet, they can interact.
A machine may discover a document first.
A human may find it later.
12. Where My Diary Continues
This brings the story back to where it began.
I used WordPress as my diary.
After the site was classified as spam and temporarily closed, I decided that WordPress should no longer be its only home.
So the architecture changed.
Google Drive became the place where I preserve and continue the diary.
WordPress remains an important historical archive.
The articles published here are still part of my writing.
Search engines still find them.
Some visitors arrive through modern Artificial Intelligence services.
And automated systems from unexpected parts of the Internet may be travelling through old archive pages for reasons I cannot identify.
But WordPress is no longer the only place where the diary exists.
If you found this article through an older entry and genuinely want to continue reading, the public diary continues here:
My Diary on Google Drive
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1WZIeL2yzkc6k3mgeyBjZF-kV64jZWhjf
There is no requirement to follow the link.
This page also exists to preserve the history of what happened.
If WordPress remains online for years, this article explains where the diary went.
If somebody reaches an old entry through Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity or another system that does not yet exist, there is now a sign pointing toward the continuation.
And if another mysterious crawler discovers this page…
well, I suppose it has become part of the story too.
13. A Final Thought
There is something strangely appropriate about all of this.
I began a diary because I wanted to preserve thoughts, questions, discoveries and pieces of everyday life.
Years later, after I had largely stopped writing it on WordPress, machines from places I had never expected appeared to wander through its archives.
At first, I wondered whether hundreds of people in China had suddenly become interested in what I wrote.
The evidence gave me a more complicated answer.
Some or many of those recorded visitors may have been automated systems, but the available data cannot prove the identity of every visit.
At the same time, I discovered something more important.
The diary had not disappeared.
Old pages were still being found.
Search engines were still referring visitors.
Artificial Intelligence services were leading some users to articles.
Automated systems were still discovering the archive.
And somewhere among all those statistics, there were still real human readers.
So this is not exactly a goodbye.
It is a record of where the diary has been —
and a sign pointing toward where it continues.
— Leonardo Cardillo
August 22, 2026
Sources
WIRED — “A Wave of Unexplained Bot Traffic Is Sweeping the Web,” Zeyi Yang, February 12, 2026.
Used for the documented 2025–2026 wave of unusual automated traffic, Lanzhou, China and Singapore attribution, the Alejandro Quintero case, Autonomous System Numbers, cloud networks associated with Tencent, Alibaba and Huawei, disguised bot behavior, and the fact that the operator and purpose were not conclusively identified.
Status: current historical source, verified August 22, 2026.
https://www.wired.com/story/made-in-china-niche-websites-are-seeing-a-surge-of-mysterious-traffic-from-china/
Jetpack — Navigating the Traffic Dashboard in Jetpack Stats.
Official Jetpack documentation used for the meaning of referrers, differences between referrer totals and total views, and limitations caused by browser and search-engine privacy practices.
Status: official documentation, verified August 22, 2026.
https://jetpack.com/support/jetpack-stats/traffic-dashboard/
Jetpack — Troubleshoot Jetpack Stats and FAQs.
Official Jetpack documentation used for the statement that Googlebot and certain other search-engine spiders are excluded from Stats and that different analytics systems may count traffic differently.
Status: official documentation, verified August 22, 2026.
https://jetpack.com/support/jetpack-stats/troubleshooting-and-faqs/
Jetpack — Privacy Policy Helper.
Official Jetpack documentation used for the types of technical data collected for Stats, the site owner’s lack of access to individual visitor information through the feature, and the stated 28-day retention of Stats logs containing visitor IP addresses.
Status: official documentation, verified August 22, 2026.
https://jetpack.com/support/for-your-privacy-policy/
Jetpack — Jetpack Stats.
Official documentation used as supporting information about what Jetpack Stats records and displays.
Status: official documentation, verified August 22, 2026.
https://jetpack.com/support/jetpack-stats/