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tinyanalytics filters out bots and crawlers before they reach your reports, so your numbers reflect real people. Detection runs several independent layers on every incoming event, and a request flagged by any of them is dropped from your human analytics — while still returning a normal response, so a bot can’t tell it was caught.

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The detection layers

tinyanalytics judges each request with layers that each catch a different kind of automation:
  • Known bot user agents — a large, categorized list of crawler signatures, including named bots like Googlebot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and AhrefsBot, plus scripting tools like curl and python-requests. Each match is tagged with a category (search, AI, social, monitoring, SEO, security, and more).
  • Bot networks (ASN) — requests from networks dedicated to bots, scanners, and AI-agent infrastructure are caught even when they arrive with a normal-looking browser user agent.
  • Request-behavior heuristics — missing headers a real browser always sends, request bursts and crawl-shaped traffic patterns, and known referrer-spam domains.
  • Automation signals — signs that the browser is being driven by automation rather than a person.

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Real visitors on shared and cloud IPs aren’t mislabeled

A visitor on a VPN, a corporate proxy, or a cloud-hosted browser can share an IP with a datacenter — so tinyanalytics treats a datacenter-network match as supporting evidence only. It never flags a request as a bot on that fact alone; another layer has to fire too. This keeps real people from being filtered out just because of where their traffic originates. The same rule protects people on shared networks — carrier-grade NAT, office gateways, and campus Wi-Fi, where hundreds of real visitors leave through one IP. Signals that only describe a crowd behind an address (lots of requests, or lots of different browsers, from one IP) can corroborate a bot verdict but never convict on their own, so a busy shared network doesn’t get mistaken for automation.

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Seeing the bots

Filtered bots don’t disappear silently — the bots & AI crawlers report shows the automated traffic that was kept out of your human analytics, including which AI crawlers are visiting your site. Detected AI-assistant referrals (a real person arriving from an AI answer) are a separate signal, covered in AI traffic.

Bots & AI crawlers

The report of filtered bot traffic.

AI traffic

Visitors who arrive from AI assistants.

How traffic is classified

How real referrers become channels.

How cookieless identity works

How human visitors are counted.

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