There are a nice number of reports of GA4, Google Analytics, showing a huge surge in organic search traffic over the past couple of days, but Google Search Console is not showing any increase, it remains flat. Some are suspecting this is the result of fake bot traffic not being filtered by GA4, but others are not sure.
It seems to be focused on e-commerce sites, but not any specific platform or CMS.
Alan Lucy posted on X a chart showing this, and wrote, "We’re seeing it across dozens of clients on different CMS platforms and GSC looks normal. It clearly seems to be bot traffic."
Steve Peron from Collective42 noticed the same thing with several e-commmerce clients of his. And they are using different CMS/e-commerce platforms.
Steve told me, "So I dug deeper into GA, and across all four sites I noticed a clear pattern. The spike in Google organic traffic is coming from desktop users on Windows with a screen size of 1280x720. Engagement metrics are terrible, like 2 seconds on site. It's not coming a from a specific country or just to the homepage. Traffic is spread out."
"I'm also seeing these spikes reflected in both Shopify and BigCommerce analytics, so it's definitely not just a GA issue," he added.
Deyan Georgiev, SEO Consultant & Founder of TORO RANK told me:
Between October 7th and 8th, GA4 flagged an anomaly - a +336% spike in organic users. However, Search Console data stayed flat. The sessions looked real on the surface, but the OS mix and lack of GSC correlation suggest GA4 may be counting automated or misattributed traffic as google / organic. It’s the biggest mismatch I’ve seen so far between the two systems.
Here are his screenshots he sent me:
GA4:
GSC:
But again, none of this is being shown in Google Search Console. So it doesn't seem to be related to the ranking volatility we reported on.
It does seem to be some sort of bot traffic.
I also am hearing about this in private SEO forums, so I cannot share those graphs or stories, because they are private...
Are any of you noticing this?
Patrick Icasas from Spytec told me:
Starting October 6 we've been seeing a dramatic spike in activity on our Shopify and GA4 reports that wasn't being reflected on GSC. This activity didn't come with a corresponding rise in ecommerce sales as it normally does and has a low engagement time.
Yes, for all my e-commerce clients, I am noticing a huge spike in organic traffic. pic.twitter.com/n0bQVvNJN8
— Jay (@_Thejayant) October 10, 2025
Forum discussion at X.
