There are some reports that in some industries, like the auto dealership industry, there is a bug with Google Business Profile insights reporting. There shows a large and unaccounted-for spike in traffic from Google Local and Google Maps for some of these businesses in these Google reports.

There are two threads about this in the Local Search Forums – I spotted this via @keyserholiday. One local SEO named George Nenni wrote, “We track GBP searches, views and actions for around 200 new car retailers, through a Jepto API into Data Studio. We are noticing more than half of these profiles received strange spikes in searches and views, but not actions. It is the same data we are seeing directly in the GBP dashboard (attached). We track separate profiles for sales, service, parts and body shop departments for each dealer. The issue is only happening with the nested department listings.”

He shared this chart from the Insights report in Google Business Profiles:

Another local SEO, Annika Neudecker wrote, “We track our GBP insights for our locations every month to watch growth and trends over time. I pulled my September data this morning and found a very curious change in the reported searches. It appears that the reported Direct searches increased significantly (about +1 mil) while Discovery searches fell by nearly exactly the same amount. This makes me wonder if Google has switched up how it counts Direct and Discovery searches for GBP listings. We haven’t made any changes to our listings which would prompt a big change in how they’re being found.”

Jason Brown thinks it might be a bug or maybe both. He said, “Bots or bug? Car dealerships saw huge spikes in views, but no clicks.”

I am guessing bots?

Forum discussion at Local Search Forums.