These are bots that “self-identify,” like SEO crawlers and uptime monitoring services, such as SEMRush, Ahrefs, and Uptime Robot. It also has pattern matching for any other bots that attempt to self-identify as bots.
With that said, there are also malicious bots that disguise themselves as human visitors. These types of bots are difficult to identify, so we view this feature as beyond the scope of our analytics plugin. Instead, we highly recommend the use of a firewall from a security plugin and/or Cloudflare to block malicious bots.
The free tier of Cloudflare will help to block bots from accessing your site automatically. You can also enable Bot Fight Mode, which will eliminate nearly all visits from unverified bots.
Furthermore, it’s important to understand that Independent Analytics does not outright block access to your site. When you get a visit from an SEO crawler, it still accesses pages on your site, but it isn’t counted towards your analytics. If you are getting traffic from a malicious bot, you want to block it completely so it doesn’t take up bandwidth, and a firewall is a good tool for that job.
