A 1-year report on anonymous users revealed a significant drop in traffic in March 2020, with a notable spike on July 31st. ked suspects something happened between March 13-20, but the root cause is unknown, with no changes to marketing or hosting.
omarfilip suggested checking Google Analytics to see if the traffic drop was related to a crawler, such as Bing. ked shared graphs showing a drop in Bing and Google crawler traffic around the same time. omarfilip noted a 40% drop in crawler users and asked about pageviews per crawler. asirota suggested breaking down the data by country to further investigate the traffic drop.
A 1 yr. lookback report on Anonymous users revealed this:
I suspect the spike at July 31st will always be a mystery, but clearly something happened in the March 13-20 week. Anyone else experience something similar? Any ideas on root cause? We’ve done nothing with respect to marketing, hosting, etc. Business as usual except for this.
(our site has nothing to do with health, coved etc.)
Can you check your stats (Google Analytics) to see where the majority of pre-March 22 traffic was coming from? Perhaps a crawler? Bing comes to mind.
https://meta.discourse.org/search?expanded=true&q=bing%20bot
Looks like a drop of about 40% in crawler users for Bing and similar for Google corresponding to the same time in your first graph. How do the pageviews per crawler look here /admin/reports/page_view_crawler_reqs?
Can you break out by country?
