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Exclusions keep unwanted traffic out of your analytics by dropping it at collection — so internal tools, staging sites, monitoring bots, and your own visits never reach your reports. You set them per site in your settings. From then on, matching requests are quietly ignored: the visitor still gets a normal response, but nothing is recorded. The same settings tab also holds referrer exclusions, which work differently: they keep the visit and reclassify it as Direct.
An exclusion is not the same as a filter. An exclusion drops the data before it’s ever stored — it can’t be recovered later. A filter just changes what a report shows; the data is still collected. Use an exclusion for traffic you never want to measure, and a filter to focus a report on traffic you did.

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What can I exclude?

You can exclude traffic by IP address, country, path, hostname, or user agent. Configure these in your site’s Exclusions settings (an owner or admin edits them). Each type matches a different signal, and all five drop the request at collection:
Path and hostname use * as a wildcard, but user agent matching is a plain substring — a * in a user-agent entry is treated literally and won’t act as a wildcard. Write curl, not curl/*.
Each list holds up to 100 entries of up to 256 characters each. Excluded traffic is dropped invisibly — a matching request gets the same successful response as any other, so there’s no way for someone to tell they were excluded.

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How do I stop a referrer from showing up as a Referral?

Add it to Referrer Exclusions on the same Exclusions tab. Matching visits are reported as Direct instead of Referral — useful for payment providers, auth portals, and other domains you own, which show up as referrals when a visitor bounces back to your site.
Referrer exclusions don’t drop traffic. Unlike the five lists above, the visit is still recorded in full — only its referrer is cleared and its channel becomes Direct. This is the one item on the Exclusions tab that keeps your data.
Enter a bare domain like stripe.com. A few rules worth knowing:
  • A bare domain also covers its subdomains. stripe.com matches checkout.stripe.com too.
  • * wildcards are supported, and an explicit pattern matches exactly what it says — *.stripe.com covers the subdomains but not bare stripe.com.
  • Matching ignores www. and is case-insensitive; entries are stored lowercased.
  • UTM tags still win. A visit from an excluded referrer that carries UTM parameters keeps its UTM-derived channel — only the stored referrer is cleared.
The list holds up to 100 entries of up to 256 characters each. It applies to incoming tracked traffic, not to imported historical data or short links.

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Why does my own domain show up as a referral?

Usually it doesn’t — tinyanalytics already recognizes hops between your root domain and its subdomains. A visitor moving from example.com to app.example.com, or back the other way, stays one session and is classified Internal rather than counted as a new referral. Own-domain rows also disappear from the Referrers report retroactively, so history cleans up without a backfill. One case still needs configuring: hops between two sibling subdomains, like app.example.com to blog.example.com. Because they share no parent-child relationship, tinyanalytics treats them as separate sites. Add your root domain (example.com) to Referrer Exclusions to cover them.

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Does tinyanalytics block bots automatically?

Yes. tinyanalytics filters out bots and crawlers automatically, and the block-bots toggle in your site settings controls it. It’s on by default, so most sites never need to touch it — bot traffic is kept out of your reports without any configuration. See how bot detection works for what’s caught.

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What is the first-party proxy setting?

The Exclusions tab also holds a First-party proxy toggle. It doesn’t exclude anything — it changes how tinyanalytics reads a visitor’s IP address when your own reverse proxy sits in front of the tracker. Turn it on only for one specific topology: your own proxy fronts the tracker and that proxy sits behind Cloudflare. In that setup, the network-level client IP is your proxy’s address, and the real visitor is the first hop in the X-Forwarded-For header. The toggle tells tinyanalytics to trust that hop, so visitor IPs — and the country, region, and network derived from them — are correct instead of showing your proxy.
Leave first-party proxy off unless your topology needs it. X-Forwarded-For is a header a client can set, so trusting it when nothing enforces it would let visitor IPs be spoofed. It’s off by default, and most sites never turn it on.

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How do I hide my own traffic?

Pick the option that matches what you want to exclude — a single device or an entire network.
Set a localStorage opt-out key so that browser stops sending anything. This is the quickest way to exclude yourself. See opt out of tracking.

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Frequently asked questions

An exclusion drops data at collection, before it’s ever stored — the traffic never reaches your reports and can’t be recovered. A filter only changes what a report shows; the data is still collected. Use an exclusion for traffic you never want to measure, and a filter to focus a report on traffic you did.
No. Excluded traffic is dropped at collection and never stored, so there’s nothing to restore. If you might want the data later, use a filter instead — a filter changes what a report shows without dropping anything.
User agent exclusions match a case-insensitive substring, not a wildcard pattern. A * in a user-agent entry is treated as a literal character, so write curl rather than curl/*. Path and hostname exclusions do support * wildcards.
Each exclusion list in tinyanalytics holds up to 100 entries of up to 256 characters each. That limit applies per list — IP address, country, path, hostname, user agent, and referrer each get their own.
Hops between your root domain and its subdomains are already handled — example.com to app.example.com, in either direction, stays one session and is classified Internal. Sibling subdomains like app.example.com to blog.example.com are the exception, because they share no parent-child relationship. Add your root domain to Referrer Exclusions on the site’s Settings → Exclusions tab to cover them.
No. A referrer exclusion is the one item on the Exclusions tab that keeps your data: the visit is still recorded in full, but its referrer is cleared and its channel becomes Direct rather than Referral. The other five lists — IP address, country, path, hostname, and user agent — drop the request at collection and can’t be recovered.

Configure the tracking script

Skip or mask paths, and opt a device out of tracking.

Filter your data

Focus a report without dropping any data.

How bot detection works

What the block-bots toggle filters out.

Verify your setup

Confirm the right traffic is being tracked.

Related topics

Analytics Channels and AttributionAnalytics Site SettingsAI Referral Traffic Analytics