Hi, @LA-Johan. Despite some comments from others above that imply otherwise, no one here is saying this is the best way for Netlify Analytics to work, only that it is how it works currently.
The short answer, without any context, is this:
- Netlify Analytics is intended to show all the traffic to sites and the reality is that bots are making HTTP requests to the sites. Netlify Analytics is just showing the facts.
For more context, let’s compare Google Analytics and Netlify Analytics.
Google Analytics:
- collects data by running javascript in the HTTP client (usually a web browser)
- will not report any data for clients that do not execute javascript
- will not report any data for clients that block traffic to google or on networks that do so
- by definition, this is a data subset of the total site traffic - it only reports traffic if specific conditions are met and with a client that cooperates with the data collection
Netlify Analytics:
- collects data using the access logs for the CDN nodes that send HTTP responses to clients
- reports all HTTP responses without exception (there is no way for a client to block reporting)
- it is the complete and accurate HTTP traffic information (which will include bot traffic)
Bots won’t run javascript so Google Analytics won’t see them. Netlify Analytics is reporting the real world traffic, not just the traffic that self-reports to Google. So, by definition, Netlify Analytics does include bot traffic.
We do understand that people would like to be able to filter this traffic from the Analytics data and there is an open feature request to add this ability.