I have been recently releasing quite a few projects and have a question regarding where the traffic is coming from. For instance one of my latest releases Race Engineer https://mager22brophybroncosorg.itch.io/race-engineer was not put into Leafo's Interesting Things Collection and thus was not shown on the Fresh Games section. However the majority of the traffic still comes from "itch.io" (AKA the Homepage), even though it is ranked rather high under the racing and simulation tags. I would assume that since the game was not Fresh to my knowledge, the majority of the traffic would come from other sources. 

In Short - 

Question 1: Why does a large portion of my game's traffic come from the itch.io home page if it is not under Fresh, Featured, or Paid (game is free). Shouldn't no traffic come from the home page?

Question 2: Has the game actually appeared in the Fresh section even though it was not put into Leafo's Interesting Things Collection?

Hey TouchedMoon. I've seen the same thing happening to my projects, over a third of our traffic comes from "https://itch.io/".

The explanation I've found is that, if you're logged in, Itch can display on its main page game recommendations tailored to you, based on what you played, rated and who you follow. If I had to make a guess, I'd say Itch is showing your game to people who have played and rated racing/simulation games highly.