Remove bot traffic in reports

This is for:

Business Analyst System Administrator

Bots are software applications set up to perform automated tasks on a site, and when present, can impact your Coveo Analytics reports. For example, unusual fluctuations, such as a noticeable decrease in visit clickthroughs, may indicate the presence of bot traffic.

To focus your analytics on real users interacting with your search interfaces, filter out bot traffic, including Coveobot activity. During index operations, Coveobot generates human-like events in your analytics data, such as page visits and link clicks.

Important

Filtering bot traffic in analytic reports only affects the current view of the data, but it doesn’t remove bot traffic from your integration. Bots will still access your search interfaces or generate events, and therefore, bot filtering doesn’t reduce query consumption (QPM and QPS).

To learn how to manage bot traffic before it reaches your search interface, see About bot traffic.

Bot traffic considerations

Before filtering out bot traffic from your reports, consider the following:

  • Bots can appear in analytics reports in many ways, with the following being the most common types:

    • Explicit automated agents

      Certain automated traffic identifies itself as bots, such as known crawlers or indexing processes. This traffic is typically classified as bot activity by Coveo Analytics.

    • Human-like automated traffic

      Some automated tools are designed to interact with your search interface by performing queries or clicking links. This behavior resembles real end-user behavior and may not be classified as bot traffic by Coveo Analytics.

    • Anomalous automated traffic

      Other automated traffic doesn’t identify itself as bots, but reveals patterns, such as a high volume of short visits with no engagement or repetitive queries. This traffic may also not be classified as bot activity by Coveo Analytics.

  • Not all bot traffic is harmful. Legitimate sources such as search engine crawlers, AI tools, and monitoring services can produce bot traffic that may be useful for your search interfaces.

Create report filters to remove bot traffic

Use a named filter to exclude traffic that has been classified as bots by Coveo Analytics.

  1. On the Named Filters (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page, add the following filter:

    Device Category is not Bot

    Admin-Named Filter removing bot traffic | Coveo Analytics

  2. On the Reports (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page, access the report you want to use, and then apply the named filter you just created.

Tip

The Device Category is not Bot filter excludes traffic explicitly identified as bot activity, but may not exclude all automated traffic. For anomalous automated traffic, you can use the Visit Browser (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) to investigate traffic affecting your search interfaces.

Look for patterns such as:

  • High frequency of visits with no engagement (for example, no clicks or interactions).

  • Short visit durations.

  • Repetitive queries or actions that don’t align with typical user behavior.

  • Unusual browsers or device types.

Once you identify these patterns, you can create additional named filters to exclude this traffic from your reports for better accuracy.