Bot filtering: analytics that count only humans
A good chunk of the traffic hitting most sites was never human. Search crawlers, SEO scanners, link checkers, and scripts all show up in raw logs, and when they slip into your analytics they quietly inflate everything downstream. Your visitor count looks healthier than it is. Your conversion rate looks worse than it is. Every decision you make on top of those numbers inherits the error.
Starting today, Clerion filters that traffic out for you. The numbers you see are people.
What changed
Clerion now recognizes bots and crawlers as they arrive and keeps them out of your visitor counts, sessions, funnels, and engagement metrics. Nothing gets deleted and nothing gets hidden. Bot traffic just gets held apart from the human traffic your reports are meant to describe.
You'll also see a small badge at the top of your dashboard showing how many bot requests were filtered. You should be able to see the work happening on your behalf, not just trust that it happened.
What it catches
This release focuses on the traffic that most reliably distorts a dashboard: visitors that identify themselves as automated.
- Search engine crawlers like Googlebot, Bingbot, and DuckDuckBot
- SEO and monitoring tools like AhrefsBot and SemrushBot
- Platform crawlers like Applebot and the Facebook link fetcher
- Common scripting tools like curl, wget, and headless browsers
Together these account for most of the non-human traffic on a typical site, and they're the ones most likely to skew a small or growing audience.
What it doesn't do yet
We'd rather be precise than impressive. This first release identifies bots by how they present themselves, which means a scraper deliberately disguised as a real browser can still get through. Catching that kind of traffic takes behavioral signals, and that work is underway. For now, you get clean numbers against the bots that make up most of the problem, and honest limits on the rest.
Why the problem keeps getting bigger
This isn't a niche issue anymore. Imperva's 2025 Bad Bot Report found automated traffic made up 51% of all web traffic in 2024, the first time in a decade it passed human activity. Much of the growth comes from AI crawlers and agents that didn't exist a few years ago.
For a small site, that matters more than for a big one. A few hundred crawler hits barely register on a site with a million visits. On a site with two thousand, they can be the difference between a good week and a bad one.
How this compares to what you have now
Some tools already filter part of this. GA4, for example, excludes traffic from known bots and spiders using Google's own research and an industry list maintained by the IAB. But you can't turn that off, and you can't see how much it removed. The traffic that's left isn't a verified count of people, it's just what wasn't on the list.
That's the gap we wanted to close: not only filtering, but showing you the filtered count, so you know how much of your raw traffic was never human. If that number is large, it's worth knowing before you read anything else on the dashboard.
Why it matters
Clean traffic isn't a vanity metric. It's the difference between a conversion rate you can act on and one that quietly lies to you. When the denominator is right, everything built on it gets more trustworthy: your funnels, your channel comparisons, your sense of whether last week's change actually worked.
Nothing to turn on. It's already running on your account. Open your dashboard and the numbers you see are the ones that were always supposed to be there.
Frequently asked questions
What is bot filtering in analytics?
Bot filtering separates automated traffic, such as search crawlers, SEO tools and scripts, from human visits so metrics like visitors, sessions and conversion rate describe real people.
Which bots does Clerion filter?
Self-identified bots: search engine crawlers like Googlebot and Bingbot, SEO tools like AhrefsBot and SemrushBot, platform crawlers like Applebot, and scripting tools such as curl, wget and headless browsers.
Does Clerion catch every bot?
Not yet. Scrapers disguised as real browsers can still get through. Catching them requires behavioral signals, which Clerion is working on.
Is filtered bot traffic deleted?
No. Bot traffic is held apart from human traffic, not deleted, and a badge on the dashboard shows how many bot requests were filtered.
Do I need to turn bot filtering on?
No. Bot filtering is on by default for every Clerion account.