Unprecedented “Views” Stats
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Hello, the last few days I have been experiencing extremely high and frankly unprecedented View statistics on my blog. Looking at the Referrers and the Clicks stats, it does not seem to explain this. This may be some bot activity. Can you recommend anything to prevent this occuring please? Thank you. Pierce.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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It is very common for WordPress.com blogs to experience sudden spikes in “phantom” views, which are almost always caused by automated scrapers or AI crawlers that the standard Jetpack stats filter hasn’t caught yet. Since these bots often visit pages directly without clicking through from another site, they won’t leave a “Referrer” or a “Click” trail, resulting in the lopsided data you’re seeing. To help the system learn and filter these out, you can report the activity to WordPress.com support or the Jetpack team, but in the meantime, you can also head to Settings > General and enable “Defensive Mode” if the traffic is excessive, or consider installing a lightweight plugin like “Bot Traffic Shield” (if your plan allows plugins) to block known AI and scraper user-agents.
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Thank you for the information. As soon as I sent off this enquiry, the traffic seemed to go back to normal. It’s good to hear that this is common. I couldn’t see Settings > General and enable “Defensive Mode”. I will continue to monitor, and hopefully, there will be no repeat of this. Thanks again. Pierce
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Hi there @piercebrown70 The setting option that @james3265166 mentioned is only available on WordPress.com sites that are plugin enabled.
If you look at the forums directly, you might also notice that there are numerous reports of stats gone wild. https://wordpress.com/forums/topic-tag/stats/ So you are not alone in this and WordPress.com is aware of the issue. Hope that helps somewhat.
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WordPress.com Forums 