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Why would on-site search queries show up as referral traffic?

Reporting & Analytics

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SEMnMs last edited by

The site analytics have been set up for over a year and suddenly last month there was a huge spike in referral traffic (1100+ sessions). Upon further investigation, the majority of it was coming directly from internally, either as mysite.com or search.mysite.com and the landing pages from the referrals are all /search.html?query=*

This was never an issue before so I'm trying to understand what could have changed. I'm following up with the client to find out if their dev team may have changed anything related to their search engine but I'm wondering if there may be another explanation.

A few notes: previously mysite.com / search.mysite.com were not in the Referral Exclusion list. I've added them now but this was never an issue before.

Thanks in advance!
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