Bot filtering in Shopify analytics and reports

Your online store might experience bot traffic for many different reasons, such as search engines indexing your products, social media platforms generating previews, price comparison sites gathering data, and monitoring services checking site functionality. These bots interact with your site differently than real human customers, which might affect your conversion data and make it harder to understand genuine customer behavior patterns.

However, entirely blocking bots from your site prevents beneficial search engine indexing, breaks social media sharing features, and makes it impossible for you to measure and track bot activity patterns. Instead, displaying and filtering out bot traffic from your analytics gives you the flexibility to analyze real customer behavior and still maintain complete visibility into all traffic patterns affecting your store.

This way, you can still benefit from helpful bot activity for SEO and discovery on your online store, but use the Human or bot session report dimension and filter to get cleaner data for business decisions when you need to focus specifically on human behavior.

Learn more about applying dimensions and filters to your reports.

Understanding bot filtering in your Shopify analytics

Each session on your online store is tracked and labeled as coming from a human or from a bot. When viewing a report for your online store, you can add the Human or bot session dimension to your analytics data to display which sessions came from real customers versus bot traffic in the same report. You can also apply a Human or bot session filter in your configuration panel to exclude bot data from your report. This bot filtering option helps you make better business decisions by focusing your report data on genuine customer activity.

When you filter out bot traffic, you might notice the following trends in your data:

• Higher conversion rates from removing non-converting bot sessions.
• Lower total session counts from removing automated traffic.
• More accurate performance metrics for campaigns and product pages.

How Shopify classifies human or bot sessions

Every event that occurs on your online store, such as a visitor clicking on a link to a product or starting a checkout, is analyzed by Shopify against a set of criteria to determine whether the event was probably completed by a human or a bot. Based on all the events over the entire duration of a session, Shopify then classifies the overall session as being attributable to a human or a bot. That overall classification is what informs the Human or bot session data in your Shopify Analytics and reports.

Shopify's classification of bot sessions is designed to be conservative because it's better to miss some bots than incorrectly label real customers as bots. For example, consider the following 3 sessions, Session X, Y, and Z, that have each performed 6 events on an online store:

Even though Session Y had twice as many events attributed to bot behavior than human behavior, the overall session is still classified as a human session because there was still relevant human activity contributing to the overall session classification decision.

The system continuously improves by learning from new traffic patterns.

When to use bot filtering

Ecommerce sites face a unique challenge because automated tools create misleading conversion data. Unlike general website crawlers that just read content, ecommerce bots need to simulate shopping behavior to gather pricing, inventory, and product information. These automated interactions create misleading conversion data by inflating engagement metrics without contributing real conversions, making your true customer performance appear lower than it actually is.

By filtering out this automated activity from your sessions reports, you can focus on genuine human shopping patterns to optimize the experiences that drive real business growth, such as personalizing product recommendations and improving cart recovery strategies.

You can use bot filtering when you want to do any of the following research:

• Investigate sudden spikes in conversion rates or traffic.
• Get cleaner data for business planning and reporting.
• Analyze the quality of traffic from marketing campaigns.
• Compare your analytics with other platforms that filter bots differently.

Displaying and filtering Human or bot session data in your Shopify Analytics is especially helpful during high-traffic periods when automated visits can significantly impact your metrics.

Considerations for filtering bot data in reports

Before applying bot filtering to your reports, review the following considerations:

• Bot detection isn't available for Headless and Hydrogen storefronts.
• Some sophisticated automated traffic might not be immediately classified, as the system learns from new patterns over time.
• Bot filtering applies only to sessions-related metrics.
• Bot filtering applies only to new incoming data as of October 7, 2025, and can't retroactively classify older sessions.

Interpreting bot-filtered data

You might find that focusing on human traffic gives you more accurate insights into customer behavior and campaign performance. However, being able to review the division of human and bot traffic can give you additional insights, including the following possibilities:

• Higher conversion rates for humans indicate that bots are diluting your actual customer performance.
• Significant bot traffic from specific sources might suggest automated crawling or testing from those channels.

Here's an example of how using bot filtering in your Shopify reports reveals different insights at each level of detail:

Level 1: Total traffic performance

In this example, your online store has an unfiltered conversion rate of 3.5%, and includes all visitors with both human customers and automated traffic. This mixed metric can be misleading for business decisions because it might not reflect actual customer behavior:

Level 2: Impact of bot traffic

Continuing from the previous Level 1 example, dividing your report data using the Human or bot session dimension reveals that bots are impacting your conversion rate slightly, indicating that humans convert at 4% and bots convert at 2%. This also proves that some automated traffic is completing checkouts, possibly due to testing tools, automated purchases, or bots that trigger conversion events.

Therefore, when analyzing your data, you might want to consider your 'true' conversion rate to be 4% instead of 3.5%.

Level 3: Referrer-specific bot behavior

Continuing from the previous Level 2 example, if you apply a Referrer Name dimension to your report, then you can review more information about where specific traffic is coming from.

In this example, the detailed breakdown displays where bots are most active and how they behave differently from humans:

• None (Direct): Bots convert at 1.74% versus humans at 4.17%, indicating some direct bot traffic completing purchases.
• Google: Bots convert at 6.67% versus humans at 2%, suggesting this traffic is possibly more than just regular bots or automated testing from Google traffic.
• Shopify: No bot conversions versus 4% human conversions, demonstrating cleaner referral source with minimal bot interference.

Apply bot filtering to your report

You can filter your Analytics data by the Human or bot session dimension across all standard sessions-related metrics including sessions, conversion rates, and visitor counts.

Learn more about applying dimensions and filters to your reports.

Steps:

1. From your Shopify admin, go to Analytics > Reports.

2. Click the report that you want to add a filter to.

3. In the configuration panel, click ⊕ in the Dimensions menu.

4. Select Human or bot session as a dimension.

5. Optional: Apply a filter to display only human visitor events:

   1. In the configuration panel, click ⊕ in the Filters menu.
   2. From the menu, select Human or bot session.
   3. Click Add value, and then select Human. The filter should read is Human.
   4. Click Apply.