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Bot and spam filtering

PureStats filters invalid domains before storing events. Bot and spam filtering handles the next problem: automated traffic on valid domains.

Signals​

Filtering can use:

  • Known bot user-agent signatures.
  • Suspicious user-agent patterns.
  • Empty or malformed headers.
  • High request frequency.
  • Repeated event patterns.
  • Known AI crawler identifiers.
  • IP and network heuristics where available.

Site setting​

Each site can choose whether normal dashboard views exclude bot traffic. Site owners can switch traffic modes when they need to inspect all traffic for diagnostics.

Traffic modes​

The dashboard traffic selector can show:

  • Clean traffic.
  • All traffic.
  • Bot traffic.
  • Spam traffic.
  • AI traffic.

Use all traffic when verifying the tracker or investigating why a visit was excluded.

False positives​

No heuristic is perfect. If legitimate traffic is filtered, inspect the event metadata, user agent, path and rate. Adjust filtering rules conservatively so you do not pollute historical analytics.

Best practices​

  • Keep bot signatures updated.
  • Avoid tracking staging domains as production traffic.
  • Use path exclusions for private pages.
  • Use rate-limit scoring instead of a single hard rule when possible.