Amazon employees just accidentally dropped a big clue about where the new headquarters could be (AMZN)

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February 20, 2018 8:16 PM

An internal Amazon page has apparently sent a lot of traffic to an article on a news site in Arlington, Virginia.

An article on a local news site in Arlington, Virginia, blew up overnight.
The site says the views mostly came from what appears to be an internal
Arlington is part of Northern Virginia's

Amazon may have just tipped its hand again.

Consider Arlington, Virginia. The city is a stone's throw from Washington, DC, and is considered a part of its metropolitan area.

A local news site called ARLnow.com says it recently saw an unusual spike in traffic to an article from December titled "County Wins Top Environmental Award from US Green Building Council" explaining how Arlington County was the first in the US to be selected for an environmental award.

The site says the story recently saw a spike of about 6,000 pageviews mostly referred from what it identifies as an internal Amazon.com page.

ARLnow.com speculates that the page is linked closely with Amazon's search for the city for its second headquarters, dubbed HQ2, and that the traffic spike indicates Arlington is being considered seriously.

Amazon did not immediately return Business Insider's request for comment on the traffic spike.

There have been more than a few hints recently that Amazon, which last month released a shortlist of 20 cities it's considering for HQ2, is leaning toward putting it somewhere in the DC metro area.

Arlington would be part of the bid for Northern Virginia, one of three DC areas on the shortlist. The other two are Montgomery County, Maryland, and DC proper.

Amazon has recently ramped up its lobbying efforts in DC, and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, already has an enormous house there, fit for holding parties and receptions of all kinds. Bezos splits his time between Amazon and The Washington Post, The New York Times said in a recent profile.

Amazon has said it plans to bring 50,000 jobs to the city it chooses for HQ2 and a total of $5 billion in investments in the local economy over a decade.

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