# Why does so much of my pipeline show up as direct traffic, and how do I fix it?

"Fake direct" is traffic whose referrer was stripped — dark social, email clients, PDF links, AI assistants. Fix it by putting UTMs on every outbound link from a restricted pick list, and by capturing referrer plus landing page on the form so an untagged visit still resolves to something.

The root cause is almost always that marketers hand-build URLs. Give the team a UTM builder wired to an agreed value set so they can't freelance, and enforce it with a restricted pick list on the source fields. Direct should be a residual you can explain, not a quarter of your pipeline.

## Sources

- **Method** — [Attribution playbook — Turn fake direct into real attribution](https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge/playbooks/attribution-playbook/)

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Cluster: Attribution · https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge/answers/fix-direct-traffic-attribution/