just made an account to say this because i genuinely thought i was going crazy.

I run a tech troubleshooting blog. windows fixes, driver issues, printer nightmares. nothing fancy but it paid bills for three years.

here's my november vs january...

GA4 sessions: up 34%

adsense pageviews: up 12%

adsense rpm: down 58%

actual earnings: down 51%

I spent two weeks thinking i got hit by a penalty. ran screaming frog. Checked search console for manual actions. rebuilt my entire ads.txt. nothing.

Then i compared cloudflare analytics against GA4.

cloudflare showed 40% of my "traffic" wasn't even loading the page fully. Just hitting the measurement endpoint and bouncing. almost all of it from AS4134 (chinanet) and a few singapore ranges.

these aren't users. they're not even good bots. they're just noise. and that noise is destroying my CTR because google sees "impressions" that no human ever saw.

the 70,000:1 crawl ratio in this post makes sense now. they're not sending traffic. they're harvesting. we're just the field.

started blocking CN and SG at cloudflare level three days ago. too early to tell if rpm recovers but at least my GA4 finally matches reality. which is honestly a relief even if reality is smaller.

question for anyone doing this longer, is there a maintained list of ASNs to block? or just country-level? i don't want to nuke legitimate visitors but for my niche i'm not sure there are any from those regions anyway.

btw glad i found this place. found this post in reddit, been refreshing reddit threads for weeks and it's just "yeah me too" energy with no actual answers. this is the first breakdown with real sources i've seen.

quietpixel_

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