Bot Activity Reporting & Mitigation

[czmudzin]

I have a few questions about the Bot Activity recorded in Adobe Analytics:

1. Since the table shows bot page views for the current quarter (FY26Q1), is it fair to say that we are serving analytics calls to the bots listed in the table?
2. Is there any way to measure bot activity against pages?
3. For a short term solution, can I create an excluded hit-based segment where Bot Name exists?
4. Will the Hit Governor Plugin allow us to limit Analytics calls being served to bots? 

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

Hi,

1. Yes, if you see data associated to the bot, that counts against your server calls, but they will not be counted in any of your standard reports.

2. Yes, though most dimensions are not available with Bot Page views, the Page dimension is available to correlate with the Bot Page Views metric

3. All Bot Page views are not included in your standard reports, they are not counted against Page Views, Visits, Unique Visitors, Occurrence or any custom event... I don't understand why you would need a segment, unless that is what you meant on question 1...  you are charged for the server calls, as these are available as part of your reporting, but by design, all Bot hits are excluded from your standard reporting. There should be no need to create a separate exclusion segment for this.

4. The Hit Governor is more designed to try and catch spammy behaviour on the fly... and prevent tracking completely.... if you find you are going over your server call contract due to behaviour like this, it's something you could try... but then you are also throwing out any way to see this potentially abnormal behaviour and monitor it for increases or impacts to your overall system. Personally, if I was seeing abnormal behaviour, I would prefer to add a flag on it, but continue to track it... then I could create alerts on thresholds and use that information to support our Operations team in potentially blocking that behaviour from accessing the site at all (rather than just closing my eyes and pretending it doesn't exist). We use our Analytics to support more than just the business owners who want to see how their content is performing, we also use our data to also support technical investigations.