Shopify bot traffic: how Store Decode leaves bots out

Store Decode leaves bot traffic out of every view, click and section number it shows for your Shopify store, with published rules it applies as it adds each day’s visits up. The rules catch a browser that names itself as a bot, a theme preview, signs of a headless browser, a burst of page views, and a visit with no interaction at all. Orders stay in your order count whatever the visit.

The method in plain words

Every page view Store Decode receives is kept as it arrived. Nothing is thrown away on the way in. Each hour, when Store Decode adds the day’s page views up into numbers, it reads each session, one visit, as a whole, and asks five questions about it. A session that matches any of them is left out of the numbers.

The five rules

1. A browser that says it is a bot. Its name matches a list of known crawlers: search and SEO crawlers, speed tests, uptime monitors, scraping tools, link previews, AI crawlers, scripts and browser automation.
2. A theme preview. The page view comes from an unpublished, development or demo theme, or a preview link: you or your developers checking a theme, not visitors.
3. Signs of a headless browser. The browser shows more than one of the signs a browser without a screen leaves; one sign alone is common on real browsers and is not enough.
4. A burst. The session loads far more page views, or loads them far faster, than a person browsing does.
5. No interaction. Every page view in the session was gone almost at once, with no section on screen and no click, add to cart, option change, filter or other recorded action.

The list of names and the exact limits are kept out of this page on purpose. Publishing them would help a crawler avoid being counted as one.

What it means for your numbers

• One flag leaves the whole session out. If one page view in a session is flagged, every page view in it is dropped before any number is added up: sections, creatives, product cards, product pages, collections and apps.
• Orders stay in. An order from a session flagged as a bot still counts as an order and in your sales. It credits no section, so it never shows as an order after a click. Cart adds from a bot session credit no section either.
• You can see the count. In Settings, under What we count, the Bots row says how many bot sessions were left out of visit, section and click numbers in the last 14 days. It updates each night and shows nothing until the count is known.
• Your own visits can be left out too. Exclude this browser in Settings stops the script from sending page views from your browser. Nothing is sent from the theme editor, and nothing from a visitor who declines analytics in a cookie banner that reports the choice to Shopify.

Why Shopify’s bot numbers differ

Shopify Analytics also leaves bots out by default, with its own rules. Shopify’s count starts from every request that reaches your store, even one that runs no script. Store Decode’s starts from the browsers that load your theme and run its script. Most simple crawlers therefore never reach Store Decode at all, while browser automation, such as headless browsers, monitoring tools and theme previews, does.

The two bot shares will not match, and the session counts can differ in either direction. Neither number is wrong: they measure different visits. Why Shopify Analytics, GA4 and Store Decode numbers differ covers the other reasons.

The exact rules

• Order. The page-view rules come first: a bot name, then a theme preview, then headless signs. The first that matches is the reason. Then the session rules: a burst, then no interaction.
• Whole session. A session takes the reason of its earliest flagged page view.
• No signal is not a bot. A page view from an older version of the script, which carries no browser name, theme role or headless signs, is read as no signal. It is never treated as a bot.
• Known false matches are corrected. A phone maker whose name contains the letters “bot”, and an app’s in-app browser whose name contains a crawler’s, are not bots on that alone.
• Versioned rules. The rules carry a version number; today’s is version 1. When they improve, the days whose raw page views are still kept can be added up again under the new version.
• Two known limits. Section numbers judge each day on its own, so a session that looks like a bot only across two days is left out of the session counts but not out of that day’s section numbers. And an order or cart add that arrives on a later day, from a session flagged on an earlier day, can still credit a section.

How Store Decode measures a Shopify store covers what else is counted, and how.

See a sample store’s numbers