Non-human Traffic

Non-human traffic is the share of visits that come not from people but from automated programs — search crawlers, social-network bots and AI scrapers.

Every site has some non-human traffic, and the issue is not eliminating it entirely but separating it from human numbers, because if bots blend with people every decision is made on contaminated data. This traffic is not uniform: Google's crawler is useful to the site, a social-network bot on link sharing is normal, but a high-volume scraper or suspicious bot can both inflate the numbers and load the server. Detection rests on two bases — a known signature in the User Agent string and an abnormal behavioral pattern such as visit speed and order — and neither is complete, so a gray suspicious zone always remains. The key point is that the right default is to exclude bots from day-to-day numbers but not to discard their data entirely; bot traffic is itself a valuable report, for instance to see which AI scraper crawls which pages.