Bots screen
Bots shows the visits your other reports leave out: the ones made by known bots and AI agents. It answers a question that has become worth asking: how much of my traffic is automated, is that growing, and what are the bots reading?
Use it when a visitor figure is smaller than the requests your server logs show, and when you want to know which pages the AI assistants and search crawlers are fetching.
What it shows
- Bot sessions - visits by known bots over the period, with the period before beside them when Compare is on. The line under the figure says what share of all your sessions the bots were. Bot sessions depend on how your site collects analytics before consent: see Bots and consent.
- Bot page views - the pages bots loaded over the same period, and how many pages a bot reads in one visit. A crawler reads many pages in one visit, so this runs well ahead of the sessions. When bot sessions cannot be counted, the line under the figure says what share of all your page views the bots were instead.
- Which bots - the bots behind the traffic, most page views first, each with who runs it and what it is for: a search engine, AI search, an AI assistant fetching a page for someone's question, or AI model training. A bot whose browser gives no name is listed as Unidentified bots. Each bot links to its own journeys.
- Pages bots read - the pages bots requested most, with the bot page views and sessions for each. A page links to the bot journeys that went through it. View all pages opens the Pages report narrowed to bot traffic.
- What counts as a bot - how a bot's visit is told apart from a person's. View bot journeys opens Journeys narrowed to bot traffic, so you can follow one bot through the site.
What counts as a bot
A visit is a bot when its browser says so. Search engine crawlers such as Googlebot, Bingbot and Applebot identify themselves, and Silktide keeps the name each bot gives, so Which bots can list them.
Analytics only sees a visit that runs your site's scripts. Search engine crawlers that render pages do, but most AI crawlers, including GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot, read a page's HTML without running its scripts, so they rarely appear here even when they read your site often. A short list of AI bots here does not mean AI is not reading your site.
A bot that presents itself as an ordinary browser, such as an AI agent driving a normal browser on someone's behalf, is counted as a visitor.
Why bots appear nowhere else
Bots are tagged as their visits arrive and kept out of every other report by default, so the visitor and session figures across Analytics describe people.
To see bots on any other report, add the filter Bot traffic is Yes. The report then shows the bots alone, with every other filter you have set still applied.
Bots and consent
A bot never answers a consent banner, so its visits are always collected at the level your site uses before a visitor consents. Bot page views are counted at every level. Bot sessions are not counted under Page views only, which records no sessions or journeys, and new accounts collect that way before consent.
When nearly all of the period's bot traffic was collected as Page views only, Bot sessions says it is unavailable rather than showing 0. The screen opens on Bot page views with the bots' share of all your page views, and Which bots and Pages bots read show page views without links to bot journeys, which would be empty. When only part of it was, Bot sessions keeps its figure and carries a mark saying how much of the bot traffic it covers.
Consent explains what each level records.