Have you seen a noticeable increase in the levels of direct traffic brought to your site over the last few months?
This pattern is something we’ve stumbled upon while preparing performance reports for our search engine optimisation (SEO) clients.
As discussed in this Reddit thread, this increase is not unique to our SEO clients, and appears to be a wider issue, with many sites worldwide experiencing similar patterns.
Websites can, of course, receive high levels of genuine direct traffic, where users type in the site’s URL into their search bars.
These are typically sites that have built strong brand recognition with their audience, such as Google or Amazon.
However, these recent and unexpected increases warranted us to look into this further.
Upon investigating the origins of this direct traffic, we found that many of these visitors originated from Singapore and Lanzhou in China, all with a low average session duration.
The sustained volume of visits from these two specific locations over an extended period suggests that these fluctuations aren’t normal and may be attributed to non-human traffic bypassing filtering systems and inflating the figures.
A comment by Raul Revuelta on the Analytics Help forum has confirmed that internal teams have investigated this issue and:
“While an immediate workaround is being developed, the root cause is being actively tackled.”
This spike in direct traffic from Singapore and China appears to be a widespread issue, so until Google finalise a fix, take your direct traffic figures with a pinch of salt.
For the time being, to get the most accurate view of site performance metrics, you can filter these countries out of your Google Analytics 4 reports or exclude direct traffic figures entirely.
Need help filtering non-human traffic out of your performance reports? Reach out to the team at Engage Web today.
- Why is your site getting so much direct traffic from Singapore and China? - November 25, 2025
- Why does (not set) show in Google Analytics 4 reports and what does it mean? - November 13, 2025
- How to see where your referral traffic is coming from in Google Analytics 4 - November 4, 2025
