AI scrapers are hiding behind referrer spam #
8 October 2026
Back in the day, referrer spam used to be a means to trick a website publisher into thinking another website was sending visitors their way.
It’s something I’ve seen often. I’ll be looking through my referrer logs, and see traffic apparently emanating from a website, usually one I’ve not heard of before.
At first I’d be stoked. Someone had found my website and liked it enough to share with their readers. Awesome. And of course I’d fallen for the ruse and gone to the supposedly referring website, only to learn there was no sign of a link to mine.
I’ve never tried to make another blogger believe I’ve linked to their website when I haven’t, so I don’t know what’s involved in engineering referrer spam. But it seems like a lot of trouble to score what might be a single visit from someone who’ll probably never return.
However, there are, or were, some websites posting lists of their traffic sources. This might prompt a visit from whoever looks at that information. This referrer list apparently also, in the past, had the effect of boosting the spamming website’s search engine rankings.
A few weeks ago I noticed a reputable American medical organisation had linked to the front page here. That didn’t seem right. Why would a website for medical professionals be linking to mine?
Of course, they weren’t. But the “visits” kept coming, and increasing. Soon they were linking to all sorts of disparate pages, none of which contain any medical or health related content at all.
It didn’t take long to recognise the pattern of page visit activity though, it was clear another AI scraper was trawling through the content here.
I looked into ways of blocking, or at least keeping the referrer spam scraping activity off my referrer logs, but as ever there really aren’t any effective solutions.
AI scrapers hiding behind referrer spam, whatever will they do next?
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