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So I've noticed in my August Google Analytics for our Canadian municipal website, Linux Chrome users have gone from 0.25% of our users in June to 10.58% in July and now 26.75% in August.

Any idea what these might be coming from? I was thinking like bots but our total users and page views are around the same as previous months. I was then thinking maybe a new Android update reporting as Linux or something? But they seem to be listed as desktop, not mobile.

Anyone seeing anything similar on their sites, or any other ideas?

August: enter image description here

June: enter image description here

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    Haven't you heard that everybody and their mother is finally switching over to Linux on the desktop? ;)
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Sep 2, 2021 at 18:03
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    The stats from my site (with millions of monthly visitors) looks very different: i.sstatic.net/UyPsP.png
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Sep 2, 2021 at 18:15
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    You possibly need to get the raw log files and start looking through those. It could be a bot or automated testing or other things - the log can shine some light on this by linking it to the IP address(es), frequency of the occurrence and what data was being looked at.
    – davidgo
    Commented Sep 3, 2021 at 1:24
  • My opinion is that it's because you got a spike of Linux Chrome users in July and August. That's why. But I could be wrong.
    – Rob
    Commented Sep 3, 2021 at 8:45

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As the multiple previous people mentioned, you need to check your data.

A huge amount of that traffic could be from one IP, it's trivially easy to write a bot that rotates fictional IP addresses.

Even if it's not obviously bot traffic, did they spend any time on your website?

The only way to get an idea of what is causing it is to really dig into your log files.

I often open a shell and use (the Linux/Mac command) curl https://ipinfo.io/XX.XXX.XX.X to get bulk data about the geo location of IPs that seem suspicious.

Google Analytics is unlikely to answer this question due to the way they sample data and only execute on clients that execute JS.

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