Bot filtering that explains itself
Some bots announce themselves. Others run a real browser and look like a person who read one page for two seconds. Stickybeak keeps both out of your numbers and tells you why, in words.
Three kinds of bot
Crawlers that say what they are
Googlebot, headless Chrome and browsers driven by automation (navigator.webdriver) are labelled as they arrive and never counted as visitors.
Likely bots
The visit came from a data-centre or hosting network (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, DigitalOcean, Hetzner, OVH and others) and nobody touched the page. They get a robot flag.
Possible bots
The visit came from a data centre but someone did interact (a corporate VPN, a privacy relay), or it was one page for under five seconds without a scroll, click or tap. They get a question mark.
Anyone who converts, with a purchase, a checkout, a lead or any other goal, is never a bot.
You choose what counts
By default likely bots are left out of every number, breakdown, the visitor list and the live view, and possible bots are counted with their badge. Each site's Settings → Bots changes that, and can hide one-page visits that lasted no time at all. Revenue and goals are never hidden. Hover a flag to see the reasons.
- Likely bots left out by default
- Possible bots counted, with a badge
- One-page, zero-second visits hidden if you choose
- Revenue and goals always kept
What the bots read
For sites on Stickybeak's Cloudflare, the crawler report shows the bots that never run JavaScript too: search engines, AI training crawlers and AI assistants fetching a page someone asked about, each with the pages it fetched.
Stickybeak keeps only a bot's network (its ASN and owner's name), never an IP address. Likely bots' raw rows are deleted an hour after they leave, and crawlers' once they're rolled up.
Questions
Will a real visitor ever be marked as a bot?
It can happen to someone on a corporate VPN or cloud desktop who doesn't scroll, click or type. That's why those are possible bots, counted by default, and why anyone who converts is never a bot.
Do I need to set anything up?
No. Bot detection runs on every visit. Settings → Bots only changes which ones are counted.
Are bots in the API?
Yes. Stats, breakdowns and visitors take a bots parameter: exclude, exclude_maybe, include or only.
Read more
- Bot filtering in the docs
How each kind of bot is spotted.
- Crawlers
The crawler report, for sites on Stickybeak's Cloudflare.
- Bot traffic
How to spot bot traffic in any analytics tool.
- AI crawlers
Which AI crawlers to let in, and how.
- Robots.txt checker
Check which bots a robots.txt lets in.