Glossary · Tracking technology
What is bot traffic?
Bot traffic is any website visit made by automated software rather than a person — search crawlers, AI crawlers, uptime monitors, scrapers, headless browsers and spam bots.
Also called: Bot visits, Non-human traffic, Invalid traffic
Updated
How bots distort analytics
- Inflated visitors and pageviews, especially sudden spikes.
- Bounce rate near 100% and session duration near zero for the affected traffic.
- Countries you don't serve, usually where large data centers are.
- Conversion rates that fall for no reason, because the denominator grew.
- Fake referrers (referral spam) and nonsense UTM values.
Signs of bot traffic
A traffic spike from one country or network, desktop-only, with a single page and no engagement, at a perfectly even rate through the night, is almost never people. So is a burst of many pageviews within seconds. Hosting providers (AWS, Google Cloud, Hetzner, DigitalOcean) are a strong signal — but not conclusive, since VPNs and cloud desktops live there too.
How bot detection works
| Signal | Example |
|---|---|
| Declared user agent | Googlebot, curl/8.4, HeadlessChrome |
| Automation flags | navigator.webdriver is true |
| Network | IP belongs to a hosting provider |
| Behavior | 6 pageviews in 3 seconds, no mouse, scroll, key or touch |
| Consistency | Claims Safari but exposes Chrome-only features |
| Verification | Claims Googlebot but reverse DNS doesn't resolve to googlebot.com |
Bot traffic example
A visit from an Alibaba Cloud IP scores as suspicious but plausible — VPNs use cloud IPs. When it then ends without a single mouse movement, scroll or key press, the combination crosses the threshold and it's flagged. A real person on a VPN who scrolls the page stays human.
How VisitTrack filters bots
VisitTrack scores every visit from 0 to 100 using hard rules (headless or automation user agents, HTTP clients, webdriver, unverified crawler claims) and scored rules (hosting-provider networks, impossible screens, no languages, no interaction, network bursts, user-agent mismatches). At 60 or on a hard rule, the visit is a bot: kept and labeled with a reason, but excluded from every number, the API and your bill. Verified Googlebot and Bingbot are labeled as crawlers. Visitors who sign up or pay are always human. A Humans / Bots / All toggle shows what was filtered. Full rules in bot filtering; test a user agent with the user agent bot checker.
Frequently asked questions
How much website traffic is bots?
Industry reports regularly estimate that around half of all internet traffic is automated, but the share reaching any one site's analytics varies widely. Check your own bot-filtered numbers rather than relying on a global figure.
Does Google Analytics filter bot traffic?
GA4 automatically excludes traffic from known bots and spiders on the IAB list, but bots that look like ordinary browsers, such as headless Chrome from a cloud server, can still get through.
Related terms
- AI crawlersAI crawlers are automated bots operated by AI companies that fetch web pages — either to collect training data for models, to index content for AI search, or live, to answer a user's question in an assistant like ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity.
- User agentA user agent is the text string a browser, app or bot sends in the User-Agent HTTP header to identify its software, version and platform to the server it's requesting from.
- Bounce rateBounce rate is the percentage of sessions in which a visitor viewed only one page and left without viewing a second page.
- PageviewA pageview is a single load of a page in a visitor's browser, recorded by an analytics tool each time that page is displayed — including reloads and, on single-page apps, each client-side route change.
- Browser fingerprintingBrowser fingerprinting is a technique that identifies or tracks a device by combining many of its observable characteristics — user agent, screen size, installed fonts, time zone, graphics hardware, audio and canvas rendering — into an identifier that persists without cookies.
Tools and guides
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