Is anyone else seeing massive increases in the (not provided) search volume on a month over month basis?

[Swarm]

All of our clients are showing anywhere from a 60% to 500% increase in (not provided) search traffic when comparing the first week of July with the first week of August.

[jesse-landry]

I don't know. I think it's gotten to the point where I avoid the Traffic Sources referral stats like the plague they've become.

You can't trust that metric anymore.

[Highland]

Remember that most of the players who send traffic to Google by default (i.e. Firefox, Safari, etc) are sending it via https, which blocks the referral data from coming to you. More and more people are also logged in (i.e. Google+) which also pushed them there.

Something I did was to segment those visits by landing page. It helps break it up some.

[SEO5Team]

Interesting post by Kiss Metrics on this topic.