Elon Musk claimed that organic traffic on X was at an "all-time high" but social media users found that his message was amplified through bot activity.
On Wednesday, the Tesla CEO who acquired Twitter in October 2022 and rebranded it with X pinned a tweet alleging:
"Traffic on X reaches all-time high."
The post included a graphic showing the rise and fall trajectory of the platform's "organic traffic" over a span of 12 years.
After majorly declining from a peak in January 2018, X engagement recovered with a drastic jump around April 2023 and landed in its current highest position at 3.3 billion.
Here's a closer look at the chart.
@elonmusk/X
However, according to Social Media Today, the chart doesn't reflect overall traffic as it excludes app usage data.
The report indicated that "around 80% of X’s usage comes via the app, so this is only a minor fraction of X’s overall usage data," based on visits to the X website.
When the social media news outlet inquired about the sudden traffic spike to an average of 3 billion per day, keyword research company SEMRush found that X's performance likely benefitted from an update they implemented.
SEMRush stated:
"This update, executed on April 6th, resulted in additional data being incorporated into our metrics (that is the SERP Features). Consequently, this led to spikes in figures in our toolkit across all websites, not exclusively Twitter [X].”
However, discerning social media users discovered harder evidence in the comment thread of Musk's post.
They found that the suspicious trajectory favoring X traffic was the work of bots imitating human activity.
Nice try, Elon.
@huntichon/X
@bigugly/X
@JonCowboyBear/X
@TommyJerry4000/X