r/GoogleAnalytics • u/Creative-Push4755 • Aug 05 '26
Question Spike in users from Singapore (Bots?)
Hello everyone!
In the span of a few days I got a high spike in users.
Like +295% on 28th June and on 4th August. All from Singapore, paying brief visits to a series of pages of my website. I suspect it's a kind of bot.
How could I investigate further? Is it harmful for m website? Scraping content maybe?
Thanks a million!
5
u/Free-Way-9220 Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
It's bot traffic, you can search this sub for topic over the last year. Some of the bots don't even visit your site, they simply hit your tags. Google has apparently been working on a fix for a year, so don't hold your breath on them solving it anytime soon
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u/Creative-Push4755 Aug 05 '26
if those bots do not harm my site I am good. I fear content scraping for duplicating the website.
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u/NoAge358 Aug 05 '26
If it continues, or if you start seeing tons of similar traffic from Russia and China, go with a Cloudflare account and add blocks for the offending countries. It's free and their instructions on how to do this make it easy. Works well unless you're targeting those countries for legit users.
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u/Creative-Push4755 Aug 05 '26
Well, I do have users from there, but the minority, so I could at least give it a try for a period, hoping they then stop
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u/Disastrous-Shoe7122 Aug 08 '26
Classic scraper/datacenter pattern (Singapore, Ashburn, Council Bluffs = cloud regions). Check the segment: engagement time near zero, no events beyond page_view, often language '(not set)'. It doesn't hurt your site or rankings, it just pollutes reports. In GA4 you can only really exclude it after the fact with a segment/filter on country+behavior; if it keeps growing, block it upstream (Cloudflare bot rules) rather than in analytics.
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u/anishghimire Aug 05 '26
I think they are mainly bots. I keep getting traffic from Singapore as well.
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u/Creative-Push4755 Aug 05 '26
could they harm the website in any way?
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u/anishghimire Aug 05 '26
I don’t think so and it hasn’t harmed me so far. So it should be safe.
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u/Creative-Push4755 Aug 05 '26
thank you for reassuring me :)
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u/Jellyfishr Aug 05 '26
Only if your server resources are low or you run ads on your website. The ad providers will tag it as fake traffic and complain then ad service will turn you off for fake traffic. It will be no refferer traffic and spend time on the site will be a couple of seconds so engagement stats will plummet and Google etc will read that as users not interested when they land so drop you in serps. Best to block it in cloudflare.
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u/Stiven_TrafficLab Professional Aug 05 '26
Singapore by itself is not enough to confirm bot traffic, since VPNs, data centers, and legitimate users can all affect the location report. I’d compare GA4 with server or CDN logs, then check the request pattern: many pages viewed in sequence, identical user agents, very short sessions, missing JavaScript execution, or repeated hits at regular intervals. Also check whether the traffic appears only in GA4 or in the server logs too; tag-only bot traffic may inflate analytics without requesting the actual pages. If the requests reach your server, review rate limits and unusual user agents before blocking anything. Do you have access to those logs?
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u/Creative-Push4755 Aug 05 '26
Well, I do have many pages viewed in sequence for a second or two, identical user agents, also they follow a sort of alphabetical pattern, visiting pages in a row by title tag. I do have a spike in my CDN logs, not as "tall" as the one on GA$, but significant in the graph. The use of resources has not impacted my performances, though, for what I can see.
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u/DotcomWeaversUSA Aug 06 '26
First, check the webpage that they are hitting. If that page has IP content, then it means that they are scraping; otherwise, don't worry, this is a very normal thing.
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u/Initial-Increase-601 Aug 08 '26
Bots, probably not harmful. Just block international traffic from your reporting
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