Spike in suspicious homepage traffic

We noticed a 4x spike in user and pageviews to only our site homepage that started on December 5th. This 4x spike in traffic has stayed like that since then. This looks suspicious because the spike in traffic shows this in Google Analytics:
-Coming from the CA, OH, and OR states only.
-Session duration is 9 seconds or less.
-Traffic source shows direct.
-1 page per session.
-Homepage visits only.

We assume this is some sort of bot or web crawler. How can we filter this out of our data so it does not mess up the good data? We already verified that the GA setting for “Bot Filtering” is checked and working. Yet we still see this bot traffic. Can anyone give us some ideas on what we can do to fix this?

hi David,

hmm, that does seem a little odd. Unfortunately, we have nothing to do with Google Analytics and absolutely no control over what it does or does not display! that’d be something you’d have to tweak in your GA settings.

I guess I said my question in the wrong way. I meant to say there is a bot traffic problem. Without worrying about GA, what can we do from the Netlify side to fix this bot problem? Maybe there are logs to find the offending source IP? Any ideas you can give me would help.

Hi, @davidbbe. I see this site is on a Pro level plan and so I opened a support ticket to troubleshoot privately. Note, we can move the discussion back if you prefer.

Also, please reply here if you do not receive an email about the helpdesk ticket. It was sent to the same email address as used for this community forum site.