Big click spikes in Search Console may be fake
Two well known SEOs are seeing sudden traffic jumps that do not look like real people.
Sudden, huge click spikes are showing up in Google Search Console, and at least one SEO thinks they are not real people. Search Console is Google's free report on how your site does in search, including how many times people saw and clicked your pages.
Joy Hawkins raised it first, saying she was seeing a few sites with massive spikes in traffic and that some of the patterns just seemed odd. Barry Schwartz asked her whether she was using any special filtering and told her to check again to see if the spike was still there. She came back and said it was still there, that three sites so far looked like this, and that she was fairly confident the cause was bot traffic based on the click-through rate patterns.
Click-through rate is the share of people who click your result after seeing it. When that number behaves in a way real humans do not, it is a signal that something automated is hitting the search results rather than customers finding you.
Glenn Gabe then said he was seeing the same thing across some of his Search Console properties, and that he was still digging in. He called it a huge heads-up.
What this means for your site
If you open Search Console this week and see your clicks jump far above normal, slow down before you celebrate or change anything. Right now this is two SEOs reporting a pattern on a handful of sites. Google has not said anything, and nobody has explained what is causing it.
The practical risk is making a decision on bad data. A fake spike can make you think a page suddenly took off, that a new post is working, or that an ad test paid for itself. If you then double down on whatever you did last, you are chasing traffic that never bought anything.
What to do
Cross-check against a source that counts actual visits. Open your website analytics, look at the same days, and see whether the visits and the sales or enquiries moved too. If Search Console says your clicks tripled but your analytics and your inbox look like a normal week, treat the spike as noise and carry on as you were.
Do not delete anything, do not change your pages, and do not report a problem to Google. There is nothing to fix on your end. Note the dates where your numbers look strange so that when you compare performance a month from now, you know which week to ignore.
If Google or the people tracking this say more, that is the point at which anything changes.
Based on the CTR patterns I'm seeing I'm fairly confident it's bot traffic.
Still unclear if it's real traffic because some of the patterns just seem odd.
OMG, I'm seeing this too across some GSC properties
Be the person who already knew
One email a day. Under three minutes. You will hear about a Google change before it shows up in your traffic.