🎯 Overview
If you're seeing traffic from regions you didn't target, the issue is usually one of two things: a misconfigured geo-targeting setting in your project, or bot and crawler activity being counted in your analytics. This guide helps you identify which problem you're facing and resolve it.
🔍 Step 1: Check Your Project Geo-Targeting Settings
First, verify that your geo-targeting configuration matches your intended audience. In your Search Atlas project settings, review which countries or regions are currently selected as your targets. Confirm that only your intended markets (for example, United Kingdom) are active. If you see unexpected regions listed, remove them and save your changes.
If you are unsure where to find your geo-targeting options or cannot locate the relevant settings in your project, please reach out to our support team — they can verify your current configuration and correct it on your behalf.
🤖 Step 2: Distinguish Bot Traffic from Geo-Targeting Issues
Unexpected traffic from regions such as China or Singapore often signals bot or crawler activity rather than misconfigured targeting. Use these checks to confirm:
- Check traffic source: Review the referrer data for the suspicious traffic. Legitimate visitors arrive from search engines, direct URLs, or referral sites. Bots often show no referrer or a generic crawler identifier.
- Look for engagement metrics: Bot traffic typically has zero pages per session, zero time on page, and a 100% bounce rate. Real users show varied engagement patterns.
- Review device and browser data: Bots often appear as headless browsers or unknown device types. Real traffic includes standard browsers like Chrome, Safari, or Firefox on recognisable devices.
- Compare spike timing: If traffic spiked suddenly on a specific date, check whether it correlates with a recent content update, backlink acquisition, or PR event. Legitimate traffic spikes follow such events; bot spikes are often random and unrelated to your activity.
📊 Step 3: Report Suspected Bot Traffic for Review
If you have confirmed that the suspicious traffic appears to be bot or crawler activity, escalate it to our support team so they can investigate and apply the appropriate filtering or exclusions on your project. To help them resolve this quickly, have the following ready:
- Your project name and URL
- The specific regions or countries generating the unexpected traffic
- The approximate date the traffic spike began
- Any patterns you noticed (referrer data, device types, engagement metrics)
Our team will review the traffic data and advise on the correct next steps, including whether any backend filtering needs to be applied.
If you need further assistance, open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type human teammate to be connected with a member of our team.