Is there any evidence that Google throttles traffic?

[smithy]

I've had my Google Analytics open the past few days in another window, so I could keep an eye on the realtime traffic to my site.

I noticed some weird behaviour, like for the active users on site in the past 5 minutes I could see that there would be 50 active users, and then maybe 10 minutes later, the number would drop to 5.

Before the recent updates, I noticed this number would stay pretty constant, though there would naturally be lower traffic during non-peak hours.

Perhaps it's just a coincidence, but it just seems a bit weird.

Has anyone else noticed something like this?

 

[KhairujjamanS]

it could be that Google is A/B testing your site on SERP. For some time showing your site to searchers, then other websites. Comparing the data to figure out which one the searchers are liking better

 

[AhFreshMeat]

I've had my Google Analytics open the past few days in another window, so I could keep an eye on the realtime traffic to my site.

I noticed some weird behaviour, like for the active users on site in the past 5 minutes I could see that there would be 50 active users, and then maybe 10 minutes later, the number would drop to 5.

Before the recent updates, I noticed this number would stay pretty constant, though there would naturally be lower traffic during non-peak hours.

Perhaps it's just a coincidence, but it just seems a bit weird.

Has anyone else noticed something like this?

Others may possibly disagree, but I’ve carefully , analyzed hourly as well as day to day activity, same day versus last week, weekly, etc.

I have a very firm belief (agreeing with you), that this is very true… a set number of visits per day looks like its almost fixed to the point it (feels like) throttling is occurring. It almost appears like the Algo has a very specific amount of traffic per day your site should receive and tries to average it out - I’ve paid a nerd level amount of attention to different pages and even when rankings fluctuate on individual pages, I would observe analytics daily visit even out to the same amount of traffic as the same day last week - but each page has a noticeably different amount of daily sessions . I could get even further into the details but it would give myself and everyone reading a headache due to its complexity in trying to communicate my analysis properly.

Whether its true or not, we’ll never know… I believe it is

 

[Ryuzaki]

I'm not saying I believe Google does this. It certainly appears as if they're capable, though, if you watch your analytics closely, as others have said. And I'm certain they're capable of doing it, especially since they're capable of doing "personalization" and "conversion campaigns" and everything else. They have a lot of data on a lot of cohorts, let alone individuals.

An extension of this concern that I come across every once in a while is that also control the quality of the traffic they're willing to send you. Do they? I don't know. Are they capable? Well yeah, just look at the Adwords campaign goals. Same with Facebook, etc.

 

[bernard]

If this happens, it could be in terms of shifting intent from broader to more narrow for searches and shuffling results for that.

The main terms seem to stable when doing rank checks for actual throttling to happen imo, but long tail could be different, the amount of long tail, that you qualify for.

You could try analyzing long tail rankings from GSC.