Bot traffic

Updated 2026-11-02

Definition

Bot traffic is visits to your site from automated programs. Some bots are useful, such as search engine crawlers, uptime monitors and link previewers. Others scrape content, probe for security holes, or fake ad clicks.

If bots are counted as people, your visitors go up, your conversion rate goes down, and your bounce rate gets skewed.

Example

This example uses made-up numbers. Your report shows 15,000 visitors and 300 signups, which is a 2% conversion rate. You filter out known bots and find 3,000 of those visitors were automated. The real number is 12,000 visitors, and the conversion rate is 2.5%.

Suppose you were testing a landing page during that period. The bots hit one version more often than the other. That can make a real winner look like a loser.

How filtering works

Most tools filter by user agent, the string a browser sends to identify itself. Well-behaved bots name themselves there. Others add lists of known data center IP ranges or behavior checks. No filter is perfect, since a bot can pretend to be a normal browser. Headless browsers and paid click farms are hard to catch.

How Headstream measures it

Headstream flags bots by user agent, using patterns such as bot, crawl, spider, headless, lighthouse and curl. A request with an empty user agent also counts as a bot. Most bots never run scripts, so many never reach any JavaScript analytics tool anyway.

Flagged events aren't deleted. They're stored with is_bot set to 1, left out of reports, and kept in your raw export. Rules you add to exclude paths and IP addresses work the same way. Bot events don't count toward your plan. The pricing page lists what counts, and the data quality page shows how much traffic was filtered.