Four days after registering a new domain, I opened GA4 and saw 65 page views / 34 users / 9 countries.
For a brief, build-in-public moment, I almost cheered. Then I looked at the breakdown. The US had 17 sessions averaging 4.9 seconds of session duration. France, Poland, South Korea, India, Singapore: each between 0 and 1.4 seconds. Japan alone sat at 751 seconds (over 12 minutes): an outlier so loud it should be illegal.
The domain is kaoriq.com, registered on 2026-05-02, a personality-quiz × fragrance e-commerce site I'm building. As of today (May 5), it has fewer than 20 articles. Doing the back-of-the-envelope math, that page-view distribution is physically impossible to come from real humans.
This post walks through how I read the first week of GA4 data on a new domain as "me + a crawler army", with the actual numbers exposed. For anyone running GA4 on a new project, or anyone who registered a domain this weekend.
The raw data: past 14 days (4 days of real activity)
