Bot Detection

SimpleStats filters out bot and crawler traffic automatically, so your visitor counts reflect real humans, not scrapers or uptime monitors. Bot detection is enabled by default and requires no configuration.

A request is skipped (no visitor recorded, no API call dispatched) when:

• the User-Agent matches a known bot signature via matomo/device-detector, covering thousands of crawlers, scrapers, AI/LLM crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, etc.), social media previewers, and uptime monitors
• the User-Agent is not a real browser or mobile app: HTTP libraries (curl, python-requests, ...), headless browsers, and scripted clients faking a browser User-Agent
• the request is a speculative browser prefetch/prerender, since the visitor may never actually see the page

On top of that, visits from datacenter IPs (AWS, GCP, Hetzner, and the like) are filtered server-side, since they are practically always bots hiding behind a real browser User-Agent. VPN users are not affected.