Fake aocr.org referrals make repository traffic insights unreliable

[korthout]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Product Feedback

Body

I maintain korthout/backport-action, and I use the traffic page to gauge how much attention a new release draws. Lately, aocr.org has been at the top of the referring sites list, and it's not real traffic.

aocr.org is the website of the American Osteopathic College of Radiology. They don't link to my repo. In the last 14 days, it sent 240 views from 239 unique visitors, so almost every visitor views a single page and leaves.

I'm not the only one seeing this. Since late September, people have reported it on their own sites and repos. It looks like a crawler that fakes the Referer header and pretends to be a regular Chrome browser. Some write-ups:

• https://tin.computer/blog/aocr-org-referrer-bot traces it to ByteDance's crawler stack, though who runs it isn't confirmed
• https://www.blackmoreops.com/aocr-org-referrer-spam-google-analytics/

This bothers me because the bot's visitors are mixed in with the real ones, and I can't filter them out, so I can't track traffic in any meaningful way.

So my questions:

• Does the traffic page filter out bots at all?
• Could GitHub exclude this crawler from the traffic numbers? The tin.computer write-up describes a pretty distinctive fingerprint.
• Is anyone else seeing this on their repos?

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[Luap99]

Is anyone else seeing this on their repos?

yes, I See it on all the repos I maintain, i.e from https://github.com/podman-container-tools/podman:

aocr.org, 23312 Views, 20282 Unique Visitors

More than twice as much as our second which is google.com.

[demegire]

It's Byte Dance affiliated scraping: https://tin.computer/blog/aocr-org-referrer-bot

[rxc1441]

• Is anyone else seeing this on their repos?

Can confirm. I am observing the identical domain URL as mentioned from OP on GitHub.

I haven’t contacted my colleagues yet. Has Cloudflare or major CDN providers provided a report on this yet?

[nekromoff]

Same. Almost every repo hit.

[cdcavell]

I'm observing the same suspicious aocr.org referral pattern across multiple repositories in the AsiBackbone organization.

GitHub Traffic Insights reports the following referrals over the last 14 days:

• AsiBackbone/AsiBackbone: 435 views, 441 unique visitors
• AsiBackbone/NetCoreApplicationTemplate: 287 views, 286 unique visitors
• AsiBackbone/Learning: 30 views, 30 unique visitors
• AsiBackbone/ReferenceApplication: No aocr.org referrals listed

The nearly one-to-one relationship between views and unique visitors is particularly unusual, and the pattern is consistent with what other maintainers have reported here.

This activity makes it difficult to distinguish genuine developer interest from automated traffic when reviewing repository engagement.

It would be helpful to know whether GitHub is investigating this referral pattern and whether suspicious automated traffic can be filtered from repository insights.

I can provide screenshots of all four repository traffic reports if useful.