Views are going to spike on any platform when you have big updates or promotions.
I barely promote at all and still get views on my projects, sometimes very few like 1 or 2 in a week, sometimes more. You can see where people are visiting from so that definitely helps to determine what is working. It is also interesting because sometimes people come from pretty random places... I have had a few hits coming from russian and chinese search engines.
You might have noticed the recent complaints , when itch was unavailable there. There are not that many indie gaming platforms. Itch will get indexed very fast on the major search engines.
Something even bad actors exploit by hosting impostor games on itch or making blog posts with links to malware. They know that itch will show up in search results.
So, it is not random. If people search for indie games about the topic you make, you might get hits from search engines world wide.
