Question · Website & CRO
How do I remove bot traffic from my Shopify analytics?
Asked by someone running an online store · Answered by Nathan Frater ·
The short answer
You can't scrub it out of the Shopify dashboard, because that's Shopify's data. Build your own source of truth instead: a few standard reports filtered to human sessions and to the countries you actually sell in.
Bot spikes tend to come in waves. When the last one hit, everyone was seeing it, and most of the traffic was coming from a single country. They seem to roll through every six to twelve months, often from crawlers gathering data to train AI models, and Shopify usually cleans the numbers up after the fact.
So I leave the Shopify dashboard alone and set up a handful of standard reports: conversion rate over time, sessions, and sales. Each one gets a filter for human sessions only. Then I add a second filter for just the countries you sell in. That gives you a far more honest view, and the spike usually disappears.
Those filtered reports become your source of truth. When conversion rate suddenly looks like it’s fallen off a cliff, that’s where you check before anyone panics.
What about bot-blocking apps? Usually not worth it. None of the ones we’ve tested has worked consistently without also blocking real customers, like people browsing on a VPN or a privacy-focused browser. Block a chunk of genuine shoppers and you’ll tank the conversion rate you were trying to protect.