That sudden click spike in Search Console isn’t real traffic. Here’s what my data shows, what’s causing it, and how to filter it out.

Earlier this week, I saw Barry Schwartz’s post on X (and his write-up on Search Engine Roundtable) sharing a screenshot from Joy Hawkins. Joy noticed that several sites were seeing sudden, massive vertical spikes in Google Search Console clicks while impressions stayed flat, and Barry asked a great follow-up question: “Anyone else seeing this? If so, how are you filtering the report…”

When I saw Barry’s tweet, I immediately thought this would be the ultimate real-world test for Marie’s Brain – my soon-to-be-launched agentic SEO and AI search analysis system.

Over the past several months, I have been building Marie’s Brain to combine my 15+ years of research on Google’s ranking systems with live, programmatic access to the Search Console and analytics data of the sites I monitor. Instead of manually clicking through Search Console property by property to see if any of my clients were affected, I asked my system to scan across all of the sites I monitor, check the unfinalized fresh data through Nov. 2, 2026, and flag any property showing a sudden anomaly in clicks.

Within seconds, Marie’s Brain surfaced the exact same vertical spike across multiple sites in completely different industries – and pulled the raw page, query, device, and country dimensions so I could see what was actually happening under the hood.

Just like Glenn Gabe and Joy Hawkins mentioned in Barry’s Search Engine Roundtable post, the majority of properties I monitor showed completely normal traffic.

Source link