Consistent spikes in Edge Requests, Fast Origin Transfer, etc

I am back again... I thought I had this under control but I guess not... I looked at my usage for the first time in months and boy was I SURPRISED!

ISR Writes: 397k/200k
Fast Origin Transfer: 12.92 GB/10 GB
Speed Insights Data Points: 9.5k/10k
Edge Requests: 944k/1M

What's odd is the spikes come in a consistent pattern

Screenshot 2025-12-11 at 20.58.07

Minus the ISR Writes Screenshot 2025-12-11 at 20.58.39

Unfortunately for me, the free tier in Vercel doesn't give me much insight into the WHY of this. All I know is that the bulk of it is coming from this project (https://github.com/JamesSingleton/redshirt-sports) which is my college sports news website https://www.redshirtsports.xyz.

Looking at the usage compared to the visitors coming from Plausible, things just don't line up. This project uses Sanity CMS and only has 691 articles. However, in the last 12 hours 790 article paths have been written for ISR. The math just isn't mathing for me here.

Screenshot 2025-12-11 at 21.02.52

If I remember correctly, every time I merge into the main branch, the entire cache is blown away meaning that every single article has to be written to ISR again even if there's no change to the article and that doesn't sound ideal.

Hi , I'll dig deeper into this but firstly I'd recommend (if you haven't already) you apply latest https://nextjs.org/blog/security-update-2025-12-11 to your projects.

Hi ! Thanks and I have been going through and updating them. This project has been updated with that release.

I know it's the holidays but just wanted to circle back on this. Mainly commenting on it so it doesn't close.

Hi , does the spike in requests come right after a new deployment?

Also, ISR is meant to keep pages updated without deployments, but not across deployments because each deployment has independent cache to avoid issues.

So the issue here was an auditing service I used (ahrefs) and having them audit my site every Wednesday. I also had PageSpeed Insights enabled in their settings which according to the ahrefs folks makes requests from the EU. Since my site is 100% geared towards the US this was odd to see. I have turned off the PageSpeed Insights from ahrefs and moved their auditing to monthly instead of weekly.

I have seen a decrease in the spikes but will continue to monitor.

Screenshot 2026-01-09 at 11.18.34