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.

[aungzayyanaing]

Yes, you are not the only one — several maintainers in this thread report the same pattern, including aocr.org as the top referrer with views almost equal to unique visitors (for example, 240 views / 239 unique visitors in the original post, and 23,312 views / 20,282 unique visitors on another repo). That near 1:1 ratio is the giveaway: real referral traffic does not normally arrive as one view per visitor.

Does the Traffic page filter out bots?

No, not in any way you can use. GitHub does not document bot filtering for the Traffic graphs, and the Traffic UI has no filter, exclusion list, or toggle to remove a referrer or a bot. The numbers in this thread show this traffic is being counted as views and unique visitors.

Also, aocr.org showing up does not mean aocr.org linked to your repo. The Referer header is supplied by the client and can be set to anything, so a bot can claim to come from any site while presenting as a regular Chrome browser. That is why this is referrer spam, not a real link from the American Osteopathic College of Radiology.

Could GitHub exclude this crawler?

Only GitHub can, on its side — for example by filtering this traffic fingerprint from the Traffic numbers. There is nothing to configure in a repository to block a referrer or exclude a crawler from Traffic. So this discussion is a product-feedback request for GitHub to do that, rather than a setting maintainers can change themselves. If you want it looked at directly, a report to GitHub Support with the repository, the dates, and the aocr.org figures is the channel for that.

What to do in the meantime

Treat the Views and Referring sites graphs as approximate, not as a clean count of human interest — and note that Traffic only covers the last 14 days. For judging interest in a release, cross-check with signals that are not driven by a web Referer header in the same way: clones, stars and forks, release downloads, and issues or pull requests. Those do not make the fake referrals disappear from Traffic, but they give a much less polluted picture of whether anyone actually used the release.