Feature Guide

Filtered Traffic (Bot Filtering)

Your numbers count people, not machines — and this is where you see everything that didn’t make the cut.

A large share of everything that arrives at a website isn’t a person. Search engines index your pages, chat apps fetch a preview when someone shares your link, uptime checkers knock every few minutes, and scrapers help themselves. Crafty Meerkat leaves all of it out of your visitor numbers, because a dashboard that counts machines tells you nothing about your business. The Filtered Traffic card is where that filtering becomes visible: how much was set aside, split into known bots and automated bursts, and which bots they were.

This card exists to answer one specific worry. Sooner or later you will compare Crafty Meerkat against the raw statistics from your web host — the “hits” or “visits” figure in cPanel or a similar control panel — and ours will be lower, sometimes dramatically so. That is not a fault, and nothing has been lost: your host counts every request that reaches the server, machines included, while we count people. Without this card the difference is an unexplained gap that quietly erodes your trust in the numbers. With it, the gap is itemised.

Picture a small consultancy that runs its first paid advert. The next morning the host’s control panel claims 340 visits while Crafty Meerkat shows 31, and the obvious conclusion is that the tracking is broken. The Filtered Traffic card tells the real story: 309 arrivals were automated, most of them a scraper working through the site page by page. The 31 are the people, and they are the only number worth making decisions on.

One rule matters more than any other here, and it is worth stating plainly: anything arriving with a source attached is never filtered. If a visit carries a referring website or one of your campaign links, it goes straight into your numbers untouched. Your advert clicks, launch-day traffic, and newsletter visits are outside the reach of this filtering by design.

How it works

The first kind of filtering catches machines that say what they are. Every program that requests a page introduces itself with a short line of text — a user agent, which you can think of as a name badge. Search engines, link previewers, and monitoring services all wear honest badges, so they are recognised on sight and counted under “Known bots”, named individually so you can see who came.

The second kind catches machines that pretend to be people. A scraper can run a real browser and wear a perfectly ordinary name badge, so the badge tells us nothing. What gives it away is the shape of the traffic: a wave of visits arriving within seconds, all identical — same operating system, same browser, same device type, same language — and all with no source attached. Real audiences are never that uniform, and real visitors usually come from somewhere.

Because a busy launch can also look like a sudden wave, the check is deliberately cautious. Visits carrying a referrer or campaign tag are exempt outright. The rest are judged against your own site’s normal level of traffic rather than a fixed number, so a quiet site and a busy one are held to different standards, and a genuine rush of varied visitors is left alone.

Step by step

1
Open the Filtered Traffic card
Go to your site’s Analytics page and scroll to the Filtered Traffic card, just below UTM Campaigns. Like everything else on the page, it follows the time range you picked at the top.
2
Read the two categories
“Known bots” are the machines that identified themselves. “Automated bursts” are the waves of look-alike visits with no source. The figure beside the title shows the share of everything that arrived, so you can see filtering in proportion rather than as a bare count.
3
See which bots came
Under “Which bots”, each machine is named with its own count — Googlebot, Bingbot, a Facebook link preview, an uptime checker, and so on. This is the part worth a glance: it tells you who is paying attention to your site.
4
Use it to explain any gap
When your host’s raw statistics disagree with your dashboard, come here first. Add the filtered total to your page views and the two figures should sit far closer together — the difference was never real visitors.

Tips from the den

◆Seeing Googlebot and Bingbot here regularly is good news, not a problem — it means search engines are actively indexing your pages. A month where they vanish entirely is the result worth investigating.
◆A burst of link-previewer hits (Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord) usually means someone shared your link in a group chat. The preview fetches are filtered, but the people who then click through are counted normally.
◆A large “Automated bursts” figure with no advertising running usually means a scraper found you. There is nothing to fix — it is already out of your numbers — but it does explain a bandwidth bill that looks higher than your visitor count suggests.
◆Compare this card against your host’s statistics once, early on. Understanding the gap once means never having to wonder about it again.

Common questions

Why are my Crafty Meerkat numbers lower than my web host’s statistics?

Because your host counts every request that reaches the server, including search engines, link previewers, monitoring services, and scrapers, while Crafty Meerkat counts people. The Filtered Traffic card shows exactly how many arrivals were set aside, which is normally the whole of the difference.

Could this filtering remove real visitors by mistake?

It is built to make that very unlikely. Any visit arriving with a referring site or a campaign link attached is never filtered, so advert clicks and launch traffic cannot be affected. Everything else is judged against your own site’s usual level of traffic rather than a fixed threshold, and a burst is only flagged when the visits are also identical to one another — same device, browser and language, with no source. Real audiences do not look like that.

Is it bad that bots are visiting my website?

Usually the opposite. Search engine bots are how your pages get into search results, and link previewers are how your page looks right when someone shares it. They are a sign your site is being found. Only a very large burst figure suggests something less welcome, such as a scraper — and it is already excluded from your numbers.

Do filtered visits count toward my plan’s monthly limit?

No. Filtered arrivals are never recorded as page views, so they do not use any of your monthly allowance. You are only ever charged for real visits.

Can I see the individual bot visits?

No, and deliberately so. Crafty Meerkat keeps hourly totals for each bot rather than a record of every request. On a busy site the bot entries would outnumber the real ones many times over, and no one benefits from paging through them — the totals tell you everything actionable.