: Why isn't Google Analytics bot filtering turned on by default ? Is there some downside to it? My sites, like everyone’s nowadays gets allot of referral spam, usually I just ignore it, but

@Harper822

The article states:


This feature will automatically filter all spiders and bots on the IAB/ABC International Spiders & Bots List from your data.


The thing is not all spam bots make it to that list in time to be detected.

At any point, the IP address of the spam bot can be changed as well as the user agent it identifies itself as, especially if the spam artist connects to the internet with a regular ISP that provides a new IP every time the computer establishes a connection. Because of this ability, there is a chance the bot can conduct spam before it is caught red-handed.

The worst case is a bot is only caught if it is reported by several people, but with the amount of technology in place today, I'm certain that algorithms are used to catch the bots, however they may not be used often enough and/or the algorithms are too slow.

So the answer then is that It's all about timing, and the IAB/ABC might list the bot seconds after it has finished its spam work.

Google wants to be nice and give the option for users to see the bot data in their analytics. There might be users that want to create websites that talk about bot traffic and may need that data in order to verify and/or explain bot traffic.

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