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Bot filtering
How Sporetag keeps bots, crawlers and automated browsers out of your numbers, and why visits from data centers still count as people.
A lot of web traffic is not people. Sporetag filters it in a few layers, so your numbers stay close to real visits.
What is dropped
These events are never written:
- Requests from bots that Cloudflare has verified, such as search engine crawlers.
- Browsers that report
navigator.webdriver, which most automation tools do. - Browsers that cannot send a beacon. Real browsers today all can.
What is marked
Each event also gets a set of flags.
| Flag | Means |
|---|---|
| Bot user agent | The user agent matches a known bot, is empty, or is a bare Mozilla/5.0 |
| Bot score | Cloudflare's bot score says it is likely automated |
| Data center | The request came from a known cloud or hosting network |
The dashboard leaves out events with either of the first two flags.
Why data centers still count
Many real people browse through a VPN or a privacy relay. Those often run in data centers. If we dropped every data center visit, we would undercount real people. So a data center flag on its own does not remove a visit.
Pageviews need a visible tab
The script waits until the tab has been visible for 1.5 seconds before it counts a pageview. Tabs that open in the background and close unseen are not counted. That also stops many simple bots that load a page and leave at once.
Something missing or wrong? Email hello@sporetag.com.