Why your bounce rate suddenly hit 100 percent

Uniformity is the tell

A bounce rate near 100 percent means every visit loaded one page, fired nothing else, and left. Humans do that sometimes; a whole source doing it in lockstep is the signature of a script that requests a URL and moves on.

Rule out the innocent causes first

• The tracker is missing from the pages people click through to, so second pageviews never fire. Check a content template, not just the homepage.
• A single page landing with no internal links produces honest 100 percent bounces by design.
• A redirect in the middle of the funnel that carries people to another domain before a second page can count.
• The page answers the question completely and the reader leaves satisfied. Common for recipe, lookup, and reference content.

Then find where it lands

A site wide average rarely collapses on its own; it gets dragged by one source pinned at the top. Open the attribution view, sort sources by bounce rate, and the culprit separates from your audience in one click.

What the session shape layer sees

Session shape is the fourth layer of detection: a bounce rate near 100 percent, sessions under five seconds, and one page per session are scored together, which is how a source gets flagged even when each individual visit looks plausible on its own.

Act on the source, not the metric

Once the metric has an address, the question changes from "why is my bounce rate high" to "is this source worth paying for", and that question already has a ranking: wasted spend before bot share, confirmed before suspected, trend before level.