InfinityFree ?i=1 Causing Direct Traffic / Referrer Loss

I’m trying to understand a referrer/direct traffic issue on InfinityFree related to the ?i=1 parameter. what happens here is, A visitor comes from an external site/search engine to a normal clean URL like:

https://example.com/page/

But InfinityFree seems to automatically redirect or append:

https://example.com/page/?i=1

After this happens, a large amount of traffic in analytics starts showing as “Direct” instead of preserving the original referrer/source.

I already:

• use Cloudflare

• use HTTPS

• use canonical URLs

• use clean trailing slash redirects

• use strict-origin-when-cross-origin

• avoid HTTP redirects

• minimized redirect chains

My main question:

Is there ANY way on InfinityFree to preserve the original referrer when the ?i=1 redirect/check happens? Or is the referrer already lost before the request even reaches my site because the InfinityFree security layer handles it first?