[dazee]

I would not be surprised if you learn this is AI related.  Not just AI crawling the site for content to generate and tune models, but also Claude like agents or thinking models.  You basically now have not just companies but people from their home machines who generate a prompt asking for information on slot cars, and the agent will go off and research it over the Internet and crawl through resources itself.

The time period you mention this happening coincides closely to the launch of Qwen 3.8 which is the latest in the line of thinking models for deep research that is multi-modal and can consume alot of content while researching.