For my blog Google Analytics has gone weird

I occasionally look at Google Analytics for my blog in the slim hope it might tell me something about the level and nature of interest (or lack thereof) from my audience.

Until a few months ago, I thought the data was somewhat meaningful and believable. It gives data on the number of views for the whole blog and for individual posts. It also provides information for specific countries.

Until a few months ago, there were (supposedly) about one thousand page views per day. A typical post would attract a few hundred views within a week of posting and sometimes up to a few thousand after a few years.

However, the graph below shows how daily traffic increased dramatically at the beginning of August, rising to several hundred thousand views per day!

[Apologies for the poor quality of the screenshot... click on it for higher clarity]

Of course, at first I thought that this was exciting and flattering. However, I quickly realised this was ridiculous. This can be seen by looking at the breakdown by country.

Of the 10 million views from the past 3 months, 1.1 million came from Brazil, and about 300 K each from Ukraine, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela. Somehow, I don't think there are that many people in those countries interested in my blog!

Perhaps more importantly, if the traffic was real, it should translate into an increased volume of blog comments, personal emails, speaking invitations, enquiries from potential students... I have seen none of that.

The traffic must be driven by some sort of bots, troll farms, or AI site scraping. I asked Google Gemini whether AI could have increased my traffic. It responded

your traffic surge is a direct result of leveraging the content creation boom and capturing high-intent organic traffic ahead of your competitors [1].When ChatGPT launched, it created an immediate divide between blogs that adapted quickly and those that ignored the technology.

This is wrong, as I completely ignored the technology! I have never used it to write content. 

It also provided me with an unrequested "Step-by-step plan to protect my gains." [Shameless AI self-promotion].

A bit more data. The number of views of individual posts has not changed dramatically and still seems reasonable. Overall traffic on my other blog has also increased, but not in such ridiculous and unbelievable ways.

Overall, this now makes me sceptical about whether any of the Google Analytics data is meaningful. It also makes me more doubtful about the massive traffic claimed by some prominent bloggers.

This is all weird. Do you know of other bloggers with similar experience?