Bot filtering

As AI integrates into daily life, web crawlers and bots are increasingly active online. They serve legitimate purposes like SEO and content indexing, but their traffic can skew analytics, experiments, and growth metrics.

Most bots operate server-side, but advanced ones also execute client-side code. Since we support both server- and client-side rendering, bots can fetch and render your defined content, inflating monthly visitor counts and polluting tracking data.

Our bot exclusion features address this by restricting bot access to experiences and blocking bot-generated server-side events, minimizing their impact on experiments and ensuring cleaner, more accurate metrics.

Available for all plans

This feature is free and enabled by default for all workspaces.

How it works

We use the WhatIsMyBrowser user-agent list to identify non-human traffic. The list is actively maintained and catalogs user agents for known spiders and bots.

Bot filtering applies at two levels: content rendering and event tracking.

Content rendering

When a request comes in, we identify bots and serve them the default content for the slot instead of personalized experiences or experiment variations. This applies to both server-side and client-side bots.

Event tracking

For known server-side bots, we do not track any events, so their activity and sessions are excluded from monthly visitors, general analytics, and all experience and experiment metrics.

For client-side bots, we block participation in experiences and experiments but still track browsing events. As a result, they affect monthly visitors and general analytics, but not experience or experiment metrics.

Disabling bot filtering

If you need to serve specific content to bots (for example, SEO-focused content), you can turn off the flag in workspace settings.

You can still exclude bot traffic from specific experiences and experiments by using the following condition in your audience definitions:

device's category is not "bot"