Bot traffic
Web crawlers, price scrapers, and automated bots frequently crawl eCommerce catalogs. If unmonitored, bot traffic distorts store analytics, causing conversion rates to look artificially depressed.
PathGuide gives you transparency rather than hiding bot rows. The bot controls live in Path Explorer, inside PathGuide: the Exclude bots checkbox in the filter bar, and Customer Insights > Bot Traffic Analysis.
Exclude bots toggle
The Exclude bots checkbox sits in the filter bar at the top of Path Explorer. Turn it on to calculate your numbers against human visits only.
Verified human session denominators
When the Exclude bots checkbox is on:
- KPI cards, journey funnel rates, and chat-impact conversion metrics are calculated against Shopify's human session count (the card shows "Shopify human: N").
- If Shopify's human count cannot be read (no report access or no data for the period), the page shows "Shopify-verified human sessions unavailable" and falls back to all tracked sessions.
Bot Traffic Analysis
Open Customer Insights > Bot Traffic Analysis (sub-tabs Overview and By country) to see how much of your traffic is automated. See also Customer Insights.
It includes:
- Traffic quality: human vs. bot sessions, with a bot-dilution factor and a "true (humans only)" conversion rate.
- By country: sessions per visitor country split into human and bot, the change versus the previous period, and a verdict of Likely bots, Watch or Normal. It needs Shopify Analytics access.
- Machine-generated visitor groups: groups of single-page direct visits that share the same device, exact screen size and language and almost never add to cart, chat or buy. They are labelled as bots for analytics only and are never blocked. This is being switched on store by store; the card says so when it is not on for your store yet.
Bots and the AI Agents tab
Automated visits also appear on the AI Agents tab, which names the AI agents and crawlers visiting your store. None of those visits count in your shopper numbers. See AI Agents tab.