We observed an increase in user pageviews from October to November as part of a broader increase we have seen since June. Upon investigating we discovered that a significant portion of the month over month user pageview gain is likely coming from automated traffic.

• Blank referrers are up 30% (while the other referrer classes look quite normal)
• Hong Kong and the Philippines are up over 100% and Vietnam is up about 260% (all the other top ~30 countries looked pretty normal)
• Unique devices data shows that Vietnam was the largest contributor to the increase in uniques in November 2025 (~20%) when it normally has a ~1% contribution along with Brazil (~15%)
• Sampling pageviews on the day of the largest increase (November 16) indicates most of the traffic coming from Vietnam is coming from the VNPT ISP which is a known residential proxy provider used by scrapers per SRE.
• Since the end of October it was observed that "for many small Wikipedias, the lists of the most visited pages are currently completely dominated by geographical articles"
• To the previous point, towards the end of October we saw simultaneous increase of detected automated traffic that was caught by the IP Spider heuristic developed in May 2025 (see screenshot from the Automated Dashboard) that lasts throughout November and peaks on the 16th of that month, potentially indicating the launch of new bot activity.