# How to investigate bot traffic using Google Analytics

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-investigate-bot-traffic-using-google-analytics/387586
**Category:** Site Management
**Tags:** moderation
**Created:** [November 4, 2025, 4:07pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-investigate-bot-traffic-using-google-analytics/387586 "2025-11-04T16:07:46Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![Discourse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/discourse/32/148734_2.png) [@Discourse](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Discourse)
#### Post date: [November 4, 2025, 4:07pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-investigate-bot-traffic-using-google-analytics/387586/1 "2025-11-04T16:07:46Z")

</div>

# Investigate suspected bot traffic using Google Analytics

This guide provides a step-by-step process for using Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to help identify and investigate suspected bot activity.

### 1. Understanding GA4’s default bot filtering

GA4 automatically excludes traffic from known bots and spiders by default.\[1\] This filtering is based on Google’s research and the International Spiders & Bots List from the IAB.

The steps in this guide are meant to help you identify more sophisticated or unknown bots which may not be on this list.

### 2. Analyze traffic for unusual patterns

Bots often generate traffic which deviates significantly from your typical user patterns.

**Steps:**

1. **Check Realtime Reports** :

2. **Investigate the geographic location** :

3. **Analyze traffic sources for referral spam** :

### 3. Scrutinize user behavior metrics

Behavioral metrics may be GA4’s strongest tool for separating human users from bots.

**Steps:**

1. **Look for low engagement time** :

2. **Check landing pages** :

### 4. What Google Analytics can’t tell you ☹

- **IP addresses** : Like Google Search Console, Google Analytics does not report on user IP addresses. This information can only be found in your **server logs**. Analyzing server logs is critical for blocking malicious IPs.

### Conclusion

While Google Analytics can be helpful in identifying suspicious traffic patterns, to slow down or block unwanted crawlers on a Discourse forum, you’ll need to adjust some of the crawler settings found under **Admin \> Config \> Security**.

Discourse already blocks several aggressive crawlers by default (mauibot, semrushbot, ahrefsbot, blexbot, seo spider) via the `Blocked crawler user agents` setting. For additional bots you choose to block completely, add their user agent to this list.

For less aggressive, but still resource-intensive bots, you can add them to `Slow down crawler user agents` to reduce their crawling speed without blocking them entirely. By default, this already rate-limits common AI bots (gptbot, claudebot, anthropic-ai, brightbot). You can manage the rate of the slow down through the `Slow down crawler rate` site setting, which controls the number of seconds between allowed requests (default: 60 seconds).

There is also an `Allowed crawler user agents` setting, which acts as a strict allowlist. If you add any user agents to this list, **all other crawlers will be blocked**. Only use this if you want to restrict your site to a specific set of crawlers.

> ⚠ Be very careful when making adjustments to these settings. For example, some site owners have accidentally blocked all traffic from legitimate search engines by misconfiguring this setting.

Finally though, remember that these measures are not foolproof. Crawlers are constantly evolving and may not be well-behaved; they may change their user agent strings or distribute requests across multiple IP addresses to bypass these limits. Therefore, while these settings can provide a strong first line of defense, you should continue to monitor your analytics and server logs for new or unusual patterns.

* * *

1. [Known bot-traffic exclusion - Analytics Help](https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9888366?hl=en) 

2. [Referrer spam - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referrer_spam) 

> Last edited by @MarkDoerr 2025-11-04T19:32:30Z
> 
> Last checked by @MarkDoerr 2025-11-04T19:33:05Z
> 
> > **Check document**
> >
> > Perform check on document:

---

_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-investigate-bot-traffic-using-google-analytics/387586)._