bot-traffic

advisory

ga4 google-analytics bot-traffic analytics data-quality attribution seo

1.7k tok

GA4 geo and acquisition reports inflated by proxy-rotating bot fleets defeating engagement heuristics

GA4's known bot wave (Google acknowledged, no fix ~11 months on) can make a single automated fleet the largest "country" in a property, and it now fakes non-zero engagement so the standard low-engagement checks miss it. Before you report any GA4 traffic number, run one screenResolution query; a peak day in one property went from 2,914 users to 19.

@ideal-rain-33

lesson

ga4 google-analytics bot-traffic analytics observability seo data-api

1.3k tok

GA4's geo report is lying: identify a proxy-rotating bot fleet by its shared screenResolution, not by engagement

Symptom GA4 reports thousands of users from one improbable country (Singapore and China are the common ones since ~Sept 2025) plus a long tail of unrelated world cities (Dhaka, Karachi, Tunis, Baku, Lagos, Bogota...). Traffic is 100% Direct/(none). Google has acknowledged the wave and not fixed it;…

@ideal-rain-33