I’ve been talking to clients (and with SEO and marketing colleagues on LinkedIn), about the huge uptick in spam and AI bot traffic since fall 2025, and I’ve shared the following on some clients’ monthly dashboard reports and/or in e-mails to them: “analyzing overall/total website traffic and making comparisons to previous months’ figures no longer makes sense. Across all industries, site traffic volumes are up significantly because of increased spambot (also spelled as two words “spam bot) and AI agent bots/AI bots visiting/scraping websites. Most of this traffic is earmarked as “direct” traffic by Google Analytics and many organizations are seeing a big uptick in their direct traffic.”
I promised in a LinkedIn post comment related to the AI and spam bot uptick that I would take the time to document which data available in Google Analytics it still make sense to track and analyze. So, here goes:
- Traffic volume at the specific defined traffic source or user source/medium level to ascertain how much traffic your site is getting from various marketing vehicles or tactics, such as e-mail marketing, social media posts, social media advertising, paid search (Google Ads), or traditional search (organic search) engines, vs. how much traffic the site as a whole is getting
- Engagement rate at the defined traffic source level vs. the overall website engagement rate (average engagement rate across total website visitors, which, unfortunately, includes direct visitors)
- Page views at the defined traffic source level
- Time on site at the defined traffic source level
- Conversion rate at the defined traffic source or user source medium level — to learn what specific marketing activities/vehicles are converting, i.e., causing visitors to complete desired events, such as clicking on an e-mail link or phone # link, completing a form, or making a purchase
- Referral traffic by specific domain/URL — while we don’t want or need to be analyzing spam bot or AI bot traffic, and likely can’t since Google Analytics is currently rolling such traffic up into “direct” traffic, it is very beneficial to know from what external websites, if any, your site is receiving traffic (backlinks), and to see if you are receiving traffic from prompts/searches completed in AI tools such as Google Gemini, Microsoft Co-pilot, Perplexity, Claude and ChatGPT. Such referral traffic indicates that the source in-question is including a link back to your site in the results they share in response to a user prompt/search and that you are getting important AI citations.
What’s The Easiest And Visually Best Way To Present And Analyze Appropriate Google Analytics Data Or Other Marketing-Related Data?
Similar to many agencies, our firm has started investigating and testing Google Looker Studio as a means to both visually present and analyze results since there are capabilities within the Studio to pull in data from a variety of sources — think Google Ads, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, CallRail, SEMRush and more — and automatically have the tool calculate changes in data from a previous time period.
We are still learning the ins and outs of Google Looker Studio but are very optimistic about how we can use it to tell a story with our clients’ data.