<p>This study examines changes in traffic to contract cheating websites in Spain between 2019 and 2024, with particular attention to two major disruptions affecting higher education: the COVID-19 pandemic and the public availability of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) writing tools. The aim is to determine whether web traffic and engagement indicators can illuminate how interest in commercial academic outsourcing shifted across this period. A web analytics approach was used to analyse 44 Spanish contract cheating websites through SEMrush data. Monthly organic and paid traffic, engagement metrics (time on site, pages per session and bounce rate), and traffic origin data were collected and examined over a five-year period. The findings show a strong rise in organic traffic during the pandemic years, followed by a marked decline from 2023 onwards. This pattern is consistent with the view that remote assessment conditions increased opportunities for contract cheating during COVID-19, whereas the wider uptake of GenAI may have reduced some users’ reliance on paid providers. At the same time, the data do not demonstrate causation and other explanations, including post-pandemic normalisation, must also be considered. Paid traffic remained much smaller in volume than organic traffic, but websites attracting paid visitors tended to show stronger engagement indicators, suggesting more targeted user acquisition. The study also shows that some of these services continued to benefit from search advertising despite platform policies that prohibit the promotion of academic cheating services. By offering a longitudinal analysis based on observed web behaviour rather than self-report data, the article extends methodological discussion in academic integrity research and provides new evidence on how commercial contract cheating websites have responded to changing conditions in higher education.</p>