Hey there, @maxlaumeister 
Thank you for taking the time to share those thorough thoughts. I have sent them directly to our product team.
I agree with Max here. I was about to sign up but after reading this thread I will have to go with the “less accurate” aka more accurate google analytics. I personally get no value in knowing the bot analytics.
My assumption is that this issue is probably very difficult to engineer.
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Hi @aaronconway! 
Welcome to the forums. 
Thanks for chiming in the discussion. We really appreciate your feedback and thoughts and have passed this information to the adequate parties.
Netlify Analytics is unusable for me & my clients without this being fixed. For example, if it reports 1,000 visitors, all I know is that there were anywhere from 0-1000 real human visitors.
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Hi @olivergburke , welcome to the forums! We are so glad you’re here. We appreciate the feedback you have provided and I have submitted a feature request to our product team. Thank you and happy building.
Hi, I just purchased netlify analytics and I regret it after reading this post… I was completely mislead by its advertisement. I hope you can take this issue seriously, as otherwise this feature is not useful at all.
Thanks for your consideration.
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I was going to buy Netlify Analytics. But now I know I shouldn’t. Thanks everyone for your honest review.
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They just launched a beta “real user metrics” feature but it’s for pro subscribers, so it’s kind of a joke 
I feel scammed tbh
Real User Metrics is very different from Site Analytics, so comparing them makes no sense.
Also canceling netlify analytics subscription until metrics are interpretable in a meaningful way. We gain little information from say an uptick in page views if perhaps due to a new crawler coming online.
Love the service otherwise! Hoping to reenable soon. Much preferable to the performance hit from GA.
I also canceled my analytics subscription because of wildly inaccurate numbers. Seems like they might be being thrown off by mastodon nodes generating page previews or something.
Did you guys fix this?
The feature is working as intended. Could you clarify what you’re waiting for to be fixed?
@hrishikesh, the engineering responses make it seem like you care more about the product doing what you designed it to do than you care about it doing what your customers need it to do.
This isn’t really an argument of whether the issue is a bug or a feature. Only an engineer cares about that distinction. The argument is about whether or not your product is worthless to your customers. And it is. And you should care about that.
If it’s a bug, fix it. If it’s a feature, have the humility to admit that you missed the mark, and apologize to your customers instead of telling them they’re wrong or their issues don’t matter.
To be clear, the issue is that the bots skew the numbers and make the product worthless to your customers.
Hi, @onecreative. Your +1 for the feature request as been noted.
Edit: I’m not trying to ignore your other comments. It is only that Hrishikesh and I have no way to force our organization to add a bot filter option to Analytics. We can note the feature requests with each new +1 but we cannot force that feature to be made.
@luke and @hrishikesh I think the frustration comes from the fact that you’re not explaining why the features is intended to work this way.
I don’t have the same breadth of experience of deploying websites as Netlify, to me knowing how many bots have hit my site doesn’t seem very useful. But maybe that’s actually very useful to other people?
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.
@luke that makes sense, though
no one here is saying this is the best way for Netlify Analytics to work
still seems like it’s obfuscating a bit. Who is this feature intended for? Are there any happy users?
@LA-Johan, how is being rude helpful in any way?
@luke I was genuinely asking and not trying to be rude, I know that my use case is not everyone’s use case. I apologize if I came across as rude, I can see how my phrasing was bad.