Website owners watching their Google Analytics dashboards have been scratching their heads for weeks now. Traffic numbers are shooting up, which should be great news, except there’s one problem: most of these visits are coming from China and Singapore, and they’re not real people.
The issue started popping up around mid-September 2025 when WordPress site owners noticed something weird. Their analytics were getting flooded with direct traffic from places like Lanzhou in China and data center hubs in Singapore and Ashburn, Virginia. The numbers looked impressive at first glance, but dig a little deeper and everything falls apart. These sessions show near-zero engagement time, almost perfect 100% bounce rates, and absolutely no meaningful interaction.
We’ve noticed the exact same thing happening on our sister site PiunikaWeb. In fact, that’s what prompted us to look into this issue in the first place, and it turns out Google Analytics currently isn’t able to stop this bot traffic.
Reports about this have been surfacing on X for the past few weeks. One user pointed out that China went from basically zero activity to becoming the top traffic source by far, beating even the US and Canada.
Another blogger got excited about a 64% traffic jump until they realized it was just bots from data center locations. Even blocking these countries through Cloudflare or web hosts doesn’t help because the ghost traffic still shows up in GA4 anyway.
Google has now officially acknowledged this as a known issue. Raúl Revuelta, a Silver Product Expert for SEO and Digital Analytics, escalated the problem in October and confirmed that internal teams identified the cause by early November. Turns out it’s a new type of bot traffic that’s slipping past GA4’s standard filtering systems. These bots are likely scraping content for LLM training purposes, which explains why they’re so persistent.
The good news is Google’s working on a permanent fix. The bad news? There’s no timeline yet. For now, the workaround involves creating custom segments in GA4’s Explore reports to filter out the junk traffic based on things like session duration under 10 seconds or specific country/city combinations. It’s tedious and doesn’t fix the standard reports that most people actually use.
Site owners are also worried about potential SEO impacts from hundreds or thousands of sessions with instant bounces. While Google hasn’t confirmed whether this affects search rankings, the optics aren’t great when your analytics show massive traffic spikes but zero real engagement. For sites already dealing with this mess, the wait for Google’s proper solution continues.
TechIssuesToday primarily focuses on publishing 'breaking' or 'exclusive' tech news. This means, we are usually the first news website on the whole Internet to highlight the topics we cover daily. So far, our stories have been picked up by many mainstream technology publications like The Verge, Macrumors, Forbes, etc. To know more, head here.
Dwayne Cubbins
1369 Posts
For nearly a decade, I've been deciphering the complexities of the tech world, with a particular passion for helping users navigate the ever-changing tech landscape. From crafting in-depth guides that unlock your phone's hidden potential to uncovering and explaining the latest bugs and glitches, I make sure you get the most out of your devices. And yes, you might occasionally find me ranting about some truly frustrating tech mishaps.
Follow Us
