How to understand the statistics of cloning repositories?

Question

GitHub

GitHub has thousands of repositories of varying degrees of activity. Many of them are pet projects and often have not been updated for a long time (mine included). At one time, I was interested in looking at the statistics of views of my open repositories (repo url > insights > traffic > git clones & visitors). I noticed that even very old repositories are periodically cloned, while cloning is not always visible on the attendance graph.
I have a hunch that it could be security scanners that distort these statistics, could there be other reasons for "phantom clones"?

Answer 1

Maybe you have CI set up and the project is being cloned from there?
Another theory is all sorts of third-party sites that index the code on GitHub, for example, some gitmemory.com