That's a fair point, and I agree that a single traffic spike shouldn't necessarily change a game's ranking.
What makes me think something else may be going on is the overall pattern.
Most of my traffic isn't actually coming from itch.io's internal discovery. It's coming from external search engines:
- Google: 28k visits
- Yandex: 15k visits
- Devlogs and direct links also account for a significant amount of traffic.
Internal sources like tag browsing and the itch.io homepage make up only a relatively small portion of my visits.
Looking at the longer-term analytics, the game was steadily growing for months. Around the time it came out of quarantine (early June), the trend reversed and visibility through itch.io began declining. Since then, I've released two major updates with accompanying devlogs, but my position in tag browsing hasn't changed.
Before quarantine, the game ranked around the top 50 for the furry tag. Today it's near the bottom among 1000+ projects. That's the part I'm trying to understand.
I'm not claiming this is a bug or asking for preferential treatment. Again, I just want to understand whether coming out of quarantine can effectively reset or significantly affect a game's position in rankings and how can I go upper. Because for now, It seems like I'm doing something wrong and my actions have no effect.