What are anonymous users exactly

The dashboard stats for my site show a lot of anonymous users. But what is an anonymous user exactly? Given the very specialist musicological nature of the site, I don’t think these as humans just casually browsing without an account - there’s too many of them. I’m confused because the stats show crawlers separately.

Any help understanding what this aspect of the stats mean would be appreciated.

Anonymous users in the context of page views are people who aren’t logged in and who aren’t identifying themselves as crawlers. We have been noticing a significant spike in anon page views recently which is often down to cheeky bots scraping the site but who aren’t properly identifying themselves as crawlers.

To give firmer numbers on this, we’ve created a new metric to better count these anon views and split them into ‘likely human’ and ‘probably bot’. You can view the updated graph in the Consolidated Page Views Browser Detection report (/admin/reports/consolidated_page_views_browser_detection)

(Quite new still, so the new data only goes back a short time)

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