If you’ve logged into Google Analytics 4 (GA4) recently and thought, “Wow, I’m getting a LOT of traffic today,” you’re not alone. Many website owners have been seeing sudden jumps in users — especially coming from the Email channel.
But before you celebrate a wildly successful campaign… there’s a good chance these aren’t real people.
Yup — bots are back at it again.
In this post, let’s break down why this happens, the three most likely sources, how these bots mess up your GA4 data, and how you can clean things up (as best as possible — nothing is perfect with bots).
1. Email Security Scanners (The Most Common Culprit)
If the surge in your GA4 is mostly from Email, this is almost always the reason.
Email servers — especially corporate ones — run automated scanners that check every link inside your email before it reaches the reader. Think of it like a bouncer at a nightclub scanning IDs.
Here’s what happens behind the scenes:
- You send an email campaign with UTM-tagged links.
- The receiving email server scans the links to make sure they’re safe.
- During this automated check, the server actually visits the URL.
- GA4 fires — just like a real user clicked.
- Boom — you get “new users” that never existed.
How this affects your data
- Fake “Email” traffic
- Higher user sessions
- Strange spikes right after your email blasts
- 0-second engagement
- Messed-up conversion rates
- Attribution chaos
And the worst part? You can’t turn off these scanners. They’re part of modern email security.
2. AI Scraping Bots (The New Big Player)
With the rise of AI tools, more platforms are scraping the web than ever before.
These bots are often smarter than traditional crawlers — some use full headless browsers, which means they load your site just like a real user does. And of course, GA4 can’t tell the difference.
How AI scrapers behave:
- They crawl your site for text, images, or structured data
- They load your pages almost instantly
- They fire your GA4 tags automatically
- They often come from cloud hosting locations like Ashburn or San Jose
- They ignore robots.txt (because why would they follow the rules?)
This leads to:
- High user counts
- Weird session patterns
- Traffic without any conversions (obviously)
- Sessions from tech hubs like Santa Clara or Council Bluffs
This type of traffic is growing quickly — and you’ll likely see more of it as AI tools continue training on publicly available data.
3. The China Bot Wave (Less Likely, But Still Possible)
If you’re on Shopify, you probably heard about this wave already.
In 2024–2025, thousands of Shopify stores were hit by a massive surge in bot traffic coming from Chinese IPs. These bots scanned store pages, product listings, even checkout URLs. But here’s the twist:
Many non-Shopify sites got caught in the net too.
How these bots work:
- They crawl thousands of domains at once
- They pull data for product comparison, testing, or scraping
- They trigger GA4 events unintentionally
- Traffic often spikes at random hours
- IP regions cluster around China and nearby proxies
Your site could be in their “scan list” for any number of reasons:
- Shared hosting
- Shared CDN ranges
- Linked from public directories
- Older scraped data lists reused by bot networks
Not the most common cause — but worth keeping on the radar.
4. How We Pinpointed the Traffic: Suspicious Cities
When we looked deeper into the spike, we noticed something interesting:
The sudden GA4 surge came mostly from cities like:
- Ashburn
- San Jose
- Santa Clara
- Council Bluffs
- Dublin
- Flint Hill
- Des Moines
- …and a few others
These are well-known data center hubs — home to companies like Amazon, Google, Meta, major cloud providers, and of course… plenty of bots.
If your GA4 reports suddenly show lots of traffic from these cities, it’s a big red flag.
5. A Practical GA4 Fix: Filtering Out the Suspect Cities
This isn’t a perfect fix, but it’s one of the most effective ways to clean up your data without breaking anything.
In GA4, you can exclude these cities using this filter:
Match type: Does not exactly match
^(\(not set\)|Amsterdam|Ashburn|Council Bluffs|Flint Hill|Fort Lauderdale|Gunnison|Havre|Lanzhou|Saint Petersburg|Santa Clara|Moses Lake|Des Moines|San Jose|Dublin|Phoenix|Cardiff)$
This tells GA4 to exclude traffic coming exactly from these high-risk locations.
Why it’s not perfect
-
Some real users may genuinely live there
-
Some bots can spoof location
-
New bot cities may appear over time
But for now, it’s the closest we can get to cleaning up the data reliably.
Final Thoughts: Don’t Panic — Just Adjust
Bot traffic is annoying, but it’s also unavoidable. Every year, automated systems get smarter, faster, and harder to detect.
The key is to:
- Learn where your spikes are coming from
- Clean up the data as much as GA4 allows
- Keep monitoring your traffic patterns
- Don’t make big business decisions from one suspicious spike
Once you filter out the noise, you’ll see a much clearer picture of how your real users behave.
And if your email numbers suddenly drop after filtering — don’t worry. That’s actually a good thing. It means you’re looking at real human performance again.
