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Can You Finally Stop Awful Bot Traffic from Skewing Your Analytics?
Many website owners have seen a sudden, large increase in visitors lately. This traffic seems to come mostly from China and Singapore. While more visitors sounds good, this traffic is not from real people. It is from bots. This is a known problem that many people are facing.
The issue became noticeable around September 2025. People saw traffic from cities like Lanzhou, China, or from data centers in Singapore. At first, this might look like your website is becoming very popular. But when you look closer, you see problems. These fake visits last for zero seconds and leave your site immediately. They do not click on anything or interact with your pages.
Why This Is Happening
Google has confirmed that this is a new type of bot traffic. Normal filters are not catching it right now. These bots are likely visiting many websites to copy information. This information might be used to train artificial intelligence systems. This is why the traffic is so persistent and widespread. Blocking the countries does not work because the bots send data directly to Google Analytics without actually visiting your site.
Many website owners worry this fake traffic will hurt their search engine ranking. The high bounce rates look bad. However, Google is typically good at telling the difference between bots and real users when it ranks websites. While the bad data is messy and makes your reports hard to read, it is unlikely to directly harm your site’s position in search results.
How to Temporarily Fix Your Reports
Google is working on a permanent solution to block this fake traffic, but they have not said when it will be ready. In the meantime, you can manually filter it out of some of your reports. This process can be a bit tedious, but it helps you see your real user data more clearly.
You need to create a special segment in the “Explore” section of Google Analytics 4. This allows you to view your data without the bot traffic.
- Go to the Explore tab in GA4.
- Create a new blank report.
- In the Segments section, create a new user or session segment.
- Add conditions to exclude traffic based on what you know about the bots.
- Exclude by City (e.g., Lanzhou).
- Exclude by Country (e.g., China, Singapore).
- Exclude by Session duration (e.g., less than 10 seconds).
- Apply this segment to your Explore report to see data from your real visitors.
This workaround does not fix your main, standard reports. It only applies to the custom reports you build in the Explore section. For now, waiting for Google’s official fix is the only long-term solution.