We have seen a significant rise in bot traffic to websites in recent months.
These bots are adopting new methods to avoid detection and when they flood your stats with fake visits, they can make it very difficult to get an accurate view of the real visitors on your website.
Protecting your analytics from bots
To counteract this we’ve developed a more sophisticated bot detection system which we’re making available to all Statcounter members for free.
Our primary goal with the new bot detection is to protect your stats from being skewed by bot visits.
Whether visits come from good bots like search engine crawlers or bad bots like content scrapers and click fraud bots, all bot visits have now been isolated and relegated to a new bots dashboard, keeping your regular stats accurate by reporting only real human visits.
Introducing the bots dashboard
Additionally we have developed a new dedicated Bots dashboard where you’ll be able to see activity from the good and bad bots visiting your site, separate from your real visitor stats.
The new bots dashboard is also available for all Statcounter members for free.
Log in to Statcounter and click View Stats to open your project. In the left blue sidebar, select Bots to open the dashboard.
Please note: if you have had a high number of bots in your Statcounter reports, you may see a drop in numbers in your regular stats which reflects this change.
We value your questions and feedback. Reply in the comments and let us know what you think.
The Statcounter Team
experienced a significant decline. Even I myself was detected by a bot. The campus internet network and provider were detected by bots.
I’ve been using your website daily for the past 17 years, and I want to thank you for the great work and all the new features you’ve added over the years. They’ve been genuinely useful.
Regarding the recent updates, I hope you can enhance the UI to let us toggle between:
– Stats shown as a bar chart or a line graph
– Human traffic and bot traffic
The bar chart is easier to read at a glance than the curve, and while bot traffic can clutter daily stats, it’s still helpful to see which AI bots are visiting the site in real time. Yes, the bot page summarizes this information, but it doesn’t show live activity. Being able to view bot traffic directly in the main stats would make it easier to temporarily block a bot during periods of high site traffic.
Thanks again for all your hard work.!
I was hoping there is an error or a glitch. All my websites are seing a significant drop for pageviews. So, from a couple of thousands to just 10,20,30, maximum 100, well that is someting that should concern any website owner who relies on clean traffic.
is there a way to toggle off the bots feature? It is marking real traffic as bot, it was working perfectly fine for years until this forced feature arrived
It’s a great feature but I think it’s being a bit oversensitive and classifying real visitors (including myself) as bots. Would it be possible to manually toggle and mark visitors as humans/bots?
I’m seeing the same thing on my site … real visitors marked as bots. How to toggle on/off would be good to have.
Ottima notizia, bravissimi.
The Tencent bots were filling up my stats, but now I can see actual visitors. Thank you SO much!
Just a question — is there a way for me, as a user, to toggle the feature to “off” — and then just use the filter by ISP function, set to “exclude” — when I want the cleaner view?
Not sure I (or others) would need that optionality — but it would seem to be easy to enable(?)… Thanks
I used to be able to view stats in a bar chart. That is no longer the case with stats shown in a graph chart. The bar chart is much better to view the stats is there a way to view stats in bar chart rather than graph?
Totally agree, please bring back bar charts.
+1
This is a fantastic and incredibly useful feature. I’ve been using this tool for years (arsoporte.com) and still rely on it regularly. Features like this, which benefit all users, only increase my confidence in this product.
Thank you, Team
Thank you for your kind words!
Thank you for sharing this information. I was having major issues with visits from bots. Great job by the Stat Counter Team.
That’s great to hear!
This is definitely blocking legitimate traffic in the form of visits to AMP versions of pages from the main stats – which would seem to defeat the object of the exercise entirely.
We deployed a fix for this about 2 hours ago. Is it looking better for you now?
No, when I click on one of my own pages in its AMP version, it is still recorded as a bot. (I don’t know if it is different for other visitors – unfortunately the site was down for most of the day due to a malfunctioning plugin).
Further to my above observations. After some experimentation I’ve found that visits via VPNs and proxy IPs are either being classified as bots, or are being ignored completely. With VPNs and proxies being increasingly used by visitors, this is a very real problem. Can we not, as suggested by another poster, have the option of turning this feature off completely – I’m capable of blocking suspected bots by IP myself?
I’m seeing a drop in traffic on all the sites in my account today. I think there’s a problem related to this update. My websites receive traffic through Google AMP service. Your bot detection system might be mistaking users linked from ampproject.org for bots and ignoring them. I submitted a support request regarding this issue.
You are right. We deployed a fix for this about 2 hours ago. You can change the bot graph to hourly to see the difference. How does it look for you now?
Some sites on the same account are fixed, but some still have issues.
The problem persists, and we urgently need a solution. Some of my sites are experiencing around 15% loss, while others are experiencing up to 95% loss.
Not seeing the Bots option in my left sidebar yet, is this being phased in?
Take that back, I see you have to be in a project before it appears – thank you
I’m glad you found it!
Excellent job Statcounter. Just had a few bad bots and added them to my servers htaccess file. Thanks for a great job.
Brilliant!
well done
Thank you.
This is brilliant & very much appreciated. My stats are littered with bots!!
Great to hear it’s working well for you.