SEO teams rely on accurate reporting to make effective data driven decisions on marketing efforts. Each marketing effort should be able to be tracked to accurately determine which initiatives provide the desired results and the ROI needed. In addition, where additional effort should be spent or which ones should be pulled back or sunsetted. Most SEO experts rely on Google Analytics and Google Search Console to provide this reporting efficiently. For the second time within the last year, there have been errors.
Google Search Console Bot Traffic
In late 2025, users began to notice spikes in traffic from China that were likely due to a new, targeted form of inauthentic, non-human traffic (bots) that is currently bypassing Google’s standard filtering systems. You may have noticed the location being the largest clue (Singapore or China). However, other engagement abnormalities which include no interactions or scroll events, very short page duration, single page views, and increases in 404 landing page visits are just some of the others. The cause was determined to be a new type of bot traffic that can bypass the standard filters.
GA4 Logging Impression Anomaly
More recently, Google has just announced a logging impression error starting May 13th, 2025 almost a year after the initial anomalies began to occur which caused impressions to significantly inflate. While this error does not affect your site performance or ranking, it can cause a false positive in terms of site performance. Google is expected to fix and resolve the issue over the next few weeks.
What SEO Experts Should Do
Many SEO experts thought that the potential increase in impressions had to do with the adoption of AI. The signs were there, an increase in impressions with minimal click throughs. Many of us thought that the increase in impressions aligned with AI overviews and the rise in zero clicks. While we might not be totally wrong, both scenarios in reporting places our theory in doubt.
So what can SEO professionals do? We should be ready to have this conversation with our clients regarding these latest updates, and have them prepared for some volatility in impressions over the next few months as the numbers return back to pre-May 2025 levels. In the meantime, you can filter our GA4 traffic so get some accurate reporting in place as a benchmark. Here is how:
How To Filter Our GA4 Bot Traffic
The bot traffic can be filtered out easily enough in GA4 to reflect accurate reporting. Here are two ways to accomplish this:
- GA4 Data Filters (Permanent Data Cleanup):
- Go to Admin > Data Display > Data Filters.
- Click Create Filter > Exclude.
- Set Dimension to Country, match type to “Exactly matches,” and Value to China.
- Set the filter state to Active.
- Explore Report Segmentation (Post-Analysis):
- Navigate to Explore and create a new report.
- Create a segment, set the condition to Country matches “China”.
- Refine with conditions like session duration < 10 seconds or city is Lanzhou to ensure you only remove bots, not real users.
Additionally, teams can setup anomaly detection in GA4 to try to get ahead of any potential future errors that may occur. Although it would not be totally full-proof, it would be a good indicator that something may be starting to take place. Be vigilant and ensure you have good benchmarks in place (automated in GA4 and in your reporting data like Looker Studio) to spot any abnormalities in data ahead of time.