Significant ~50% traffic drop across 25+ sites immediately after updating from 5.4.0 to 5.8.0

Support & Bugs
1

Hello everyone,

We recently updated our Matomo instance from version 5.4.0 to the latest 5.8.0. Immediately following the update, we observed a massive drop in registered traffic—roughly 50% across 25+ different websites.

While marketing conversion metrics seem relatively stable, the total visit count and unique visitor metrics have plummeted. We have ruled out tracking code changes on the sites themselves.

I suspect this might be related to the new “AI Assistants” tracking or updated bot filters. Could the team/community confirm:

Did the bot/K.I. (AI) filtering logic become significantly more strict between 5.4.0 and 5.8.0?

Any guidance on which specific changelog items or settings to investigate would be greatly appreciated.

2

Hi Roman,

We haven’t heard of any widespread issues around large drops in traffic between versions that you have mentioned. It’s been a few days since you mentioned it. Has the traffic again recovered or are you still seeing a drop in traffic? If so perhaps email us at hello@matomo.org and we can dig a little deeper.