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Identifying bot activity on your online store

Bot activity on your online store can appear as unusual traffic patterns, unexpected customer behavior, or analytics anomalies that differ from normal visitor interactions. Understanding how to identify these signs and distinguish them from legitimate business activity is useful in interpreting your store's performance. This guide helps you recognize common indicators of bot activity, such as sudden spikes in orders or sessions, unusual customer profile creation, and abnormal analytics data.

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Potential signs of bot activity on your online store

Bot activity is most often characterized by changes in volume, such as sudden spikes or drops in activity to your online store. Bots can perform actions much faster than a human, so changes that are much higher in volume can indicate that a bot has interacted with your store.

Review the following list of examples that can indicate that a bot has interacted with your online store:

  • A high volume of free ($0.00) orders have been placed.
  • A high volume of checkout or payment attempts use repeated or suspicious customer details. Suspected card-testing or bot checkout attempts might not appear as abandoned checkouts.
  • A high volume of many different customer profiles with unexpected, strangely-formatted names, such as mixtures of letters and numbers, have been created.
  • Your online store sessions reports are displaying abnormal data, including any of the following deviations:
  • Your online store conversion rate displays a sudden spike or sudden drop.
  • A high volume of search terms that resemble request IDs, such as long strings of letters and numbers, or strangely-formatted searches, such as using technical terms or code notation, are captured on your online store.

Potential reasons for bot-like activity on your online store

Depending on what kind of bot-like behavior you're experiencing on your online store, there can be a number of potential reasons that could account for the activity you're noticing that isn't necessarily attributable to a bot. Consider the recent changes that you or a user might have made to your store that might account for any sudden spikes or drops in activity on your online store.

If the activity on your store is attributable to a bot, then learn more about reducing bot impact on your store.

Sudden spikes in activity

The following example scenarios might cause a spike in activity that resembles a bot on your online store:

  • You have a free product active on your online store that you thought was unavailable to purchase, but is actually available to buy. This free product was discovered by a third-party, and the sales are human customers instead of a bot.
  • You recently installed a third-party integration that migrates customer records into Shopify, and it's not functioning in the way that you expected.
  • Your hCaptcha has been deactivated, and you're now experiencing higher activity on forms and customer account pages.
  • Your online store is being indexed by a niche search engine whose web crawler isn't filtered out of Shopify's analytics.
  • You're experiencing an unexpected flash sale. This is usually due to some publicity your business received that you weren't warned in advance about, or a marketing campaign that you didn't predict the success of.
  • You or a user are collaborating with a third-party to perform quality assurance, load testing, or similar web performance explorations of your storefront that emulate genuine traffic.
  • You're using a third-party integration for your online store search that modifies a visitor's search terms in unexpected ways. These integrations can offer features that allow more complex search syntax, such as logical operators, which can resemble those generated by bots.

Sudden drops in activity

The following example scenarios might cause a drop in activity that resembles a bot on your online store:

  • Your customers are converting at a higher rate through checkout methods that skip adding to cart, such as accelerated checkout buttons.
  • You've accidentally activated your storefront password page and visitors can't access your store.
  • You've recently activated checkout requirements that are known to reduce conversion, or already have these requirements activated, and are seeing an increase in customer traffic that are abandoning their carts because of it.
  • You've recently changed how you track visitors, or made third-party customizations that are interfering with your Shopify analytics.
  • Your analytics are being impacted by cookie-based data collection:
    • Your store isn't collecting cookie tracking consent, a significant volume of visitors are declining to consent, or your consent collection third-party integration isn't using Shopify's Customer Privacy API.
    • There's an increase in customers using VPNs or other methods of cookie-blocking.
  • You're directing the majority of your sales during the affected period through sales channels that aren't tracked for online store conversion, such as importing orders from a third-party integration.