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Hey George, As you say, Google shouldn't be inferring ranking adaptations from your data, for your site (within your Google Analytics profile). If they use any data in that kind of way, it would probably be from Search Console (which is actually Google's data, from their side) If you can identify that it certainly is bot traffic, then it's unlikely that Google would move on it at all. They're very good at detecting fake traffic. Back in the day 'click-farms' used to be a thing, hundreds of people in third world countries (or a robot) clicking Google search results to try and increase CTR. If they've taken measures to filter that out (which they have) then 'dumb' bot traffic shouldn't impact you much That being said, if all the bot traffic slows your site down a lot and then causes real users to react negatively to their browsing experience, that could be something which Google might pin you on Your main thing to do is to really identify the traffic and what network domain it's coming from. If it looks obviously 'bot-like' then you can take measures to block requests from that area of the web. Be careful though, it might be a legitimate crawler, even Rodgerbot (the Moz crawler!) See if you can pin the traffic to a network domain in GA, and then an IP-range in something like AWStats or server-log based analysis software. If you can say, yeah that IP range is probably that network domain and my vague idea of what it is, is X - then you'll be in a much better (more informed) place to proceed