🌐 Why Am I Seeing Traffic From China or Singapore?
If your UK-targeted websites are suddenly showing traffic spikes from countries like China or Singapore, there are two likely explanations: bot or crawler activity, or a misconfiguration in your geo-targeting settings. This article walks you through how to diagnose the cause and take corrective action.
🤖 Step 1 — Determine Whether the Traffic Is from Bots
Unexpected international traffic spikes are most commonly caused by automated bots, web scrapers, or data centre crawlers rather than real users. Look for these warning signs in your analytics platform:
- Bounce rate is unusually high (above 90%) for the suspicious traffic segment
- Session duration is near zero — bots rarely spend time on pages
- Pages per session is exactly 1 across a large volume of visits
- No conversions or goal completions from the traffic source
- Traffic arrives in short, concentrated bursts rather than a gradual increase
If several of these signs are present at the same time, bot activity is the most likely cause. Real organic growth from a new region is typically gradual and shows meaningful engagement metrics.
⚙️ Step 2 — Verify Your Geo-Targeting Configuration
Even when bot traffic is the primary cause, it is worth confirming that your geo-targeting settings are correctly configured. A misconfiguration could amplify the problem or mask its true source. Check each of the following:
- Google Search Console — International Targeting: Go to Search Console → Legacy Tools → International Targeting. Confirm the target country is set to United Kingdom for each of your four sites. If it is set to Unlisted or the wrong country, correct it immediately.
- Hreflang tags: If your sites serve multiple language variants, verify that hreflang="en-gb" tags are present and correctly implemented in your page source or sitemap. Incorrect or missing hreflang can cause search engines to serve your pages to unintended audiences.
- Server or CDN location: Confirm your hosting or CDN is not automatically routing traffic through international nodes that could confuse geo-detection.
- Analytics filters: Check whether any existing IP exclusion or geo filters in your analytics account have been accidentally removed or changed.
📊 Step 3 — Investigate in Search Atlas Site Explorer
Use Search Atlas to cross-reference whether the traffic spike corresponds to any real keyword ranking changes in those regions. This helps confirm whether the visits are organic or artificial.
- In the left sidebar, navigate to Site Metrics (Site Explorer).
- Enter your website URL and review the organic traffic data by region and keyword.
- Go to Keywords → Rank Tracker and check whether any keywords are ranking in Chinese or Singaporean search results. If your keywords are purely UK-focused and show no international rankings, this strongly suggests the traffic is not organic.
- Go to Keywords → Keyword Gap to compare your site against competitors and confirm whether international visibility has genuinely expanded or whether your domestic rankings remain unchanged.
If Site Explorer shows no corresponding keyword rankings or visibility in China or Singapore, the traffic spike is almost certainly non-organic.
🛠️ Step 4 — Filter and Block Bot Traffic
Once you have confirmed the traffic is from bots or crawlers, take the following steps to filter it from your data and reduce its impact:
- In Google Analytics 4: Create an audience filter to exclude traffic from the relevant countries (China, Singapore) if you have no legitimate audience there. Navigate to Admin → Data Streams → Configure Tag Settings → Define Internal Traffic, or use Reporting Identity filters.
- In Google Analytics 4 (Bot filtering): Go to Admin → Data Settings → Data Filters and enable the Bot and spider filtering option if it is not already active.
- At the server or firewall level: Work with your hosting provider or IT team to block known data centre IP ranges associated with scraping activity using a Web Application Firewall (WAF) such as Cloudflare.
- robots.txt: Ensure your robots.txt file is correctly configured. While it will not stop malicious bots, it signals legitimate crawlers and helps identify bad actors that ignore the file.
💡 Step 5 — Monitor Going Forward
After applying filters and verifying your settings, monitor your traffic over the next 7 to 14 days. Watch for:
- A return to your normal UK-centric traffic baseline
- Any further spikes that may indicate persistent crawler activity
- Changes in your UK keyword rankings, which should remain unaffected by bot traffic alone
Set up custom alerts in your analytics platform to notify you if traffic from specific countries exceeds a defined threshold. This allows you to catch future spikes early and investigate before the data skews your reporting.
💬 Need More Help?
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.