Technical Support Forum

To be honest, your guess is as good as mine.

Due to privacy issues, referring urls are usually not included anymore. People realized long ago that those shared previous browsing history, to even the smallest degree, so much of the time, those just don’t come through. Even still in the other hand, if you’re a bad bot and you want to appear as less bot, you might just toss in a fake base Google referring UR to look like you came visit Google search. You can’t really take much from that stat either way as it’s sent via the browser or bot.

So… The summary is more that I have no idea. Google constantly updates their indexing … is it possible your items just got bumped to the top of some search term? It is. Is it possible your items got sucked into some AI feeder, it is. The fact that you’re seeing it across your many items probably means a bot or engine or scraper.

To be sure, the traffic to your items does not mimic the sites overall traffic - that is to say we’re not seeing 5 or 20 or 50 or 100 times our “normal” traffic across the open public parts of the site. (Frankly that would be really bad from a usage cost standpoint.) Like this item, for example, has pretty consistently the same traffic. If it was a global bot thing, one might expect this item to have the same view bumps you’re asking about.

But… for you, is it actual human readers? I have no idea. The only way to have a handle on that is to go with the user restriction making it pretty surely actual people.

Hope this helps,
SM



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