Title: Started counting bots
Last modified: March 5, 2026

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# Started counting bots

 *  [Artan](https://wordpress.org/support/users/artankrasniqi1988/)
 * (@artankrasniqi1988)
 * [2 months, 3 weeks ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/started-counting-bots/)
 * Hi,
 * since the 02.03. or 03.03. the plugin started counting bots into the statistics.
   I didn´t change anything but it´s clear because stats jumped up enormously. What
   happened?
 * Regards
 * ![](https://i0.wp.com/snipboard.io/dTefGp.jpg?ssl=1)
 * ![](https://i0.wp.com/snipboard.io/z0c1mE.jpg?ssl=1)

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

 *  Plugin Author [Mostafa Soufi](https://wordpress.org/support/users/mostafas1990/)
 * (@mostafas1990)
 * [2 months, 2 weeks ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/started-counting-bots/#post-18849683)
 * Hi [@artankrasniqi1988](https://wordpress.org/support/users/artankrasniqi1988/),
 * Thank you for reporting this. This is most likely caused by new bots using user
   agents that aren’t recognized by the bot detection library.
 * Here’s what you can do:
    1. **Enable Robot Threshold** — go to **WP Statistics → Settings → General → Robot
       Threshold** and set a value (e.g., 50). This will automatically exclude any 
       IP that exceeds that many daily hits
    2. **Check suspicious visitors** — go to the **Visitors** page and look at the 
       top IPs around March 2-3. If you see IPs with hundreds of hits, those are likely
       bots. You can exclude them via **Settings → Exclusions → Excluded IPs**
    3. **Purge bot data** — after identifying the bot IPs, you can clean up the inflated
       data from **WP Statistics → Optimization → Purging**
 * We also have an upcoming release with an updated bot detection library that includes
   hundreds of new bot signatures, which should help prevent this going forward.
 * Let us know if the issue persists!
 *  Thread Starter [Artan](https://wordpress.org/support/users/artankrasniqi1988/)
 * (@artankrasniqi1988)
 * [2 months, 1 week ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/started-counting-bots/#post-18852808)
 * Hi,
 * we still get a lot of bots. Also in live view there are a lot. We also get this
   warning in debug info:
 * > Type: Error
   > Message: unlink(/data/sites/web/…/www/wp-content/wflogs/template.0525632001773318696.
   > tmp): No such file or directory
   > Occurred At: March 12, 2026 at 12:31:38
 * Regards
 *  Plugin Author [Mostafa Soufi](https://wordpress.org/support/users/mostafas1990/)
 * (@mostafas1990)
 * [2 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/started-counting-bots/#post-18858752)
 * Hi [@artankrasniqi1988](https://wordpress.org/support/users/artankrasniqi1988/),
 * Sorry to hear the issue persists. A couple of things:
    1. The debug error you shared (wflogs/template…) is from Wordfence, not WP Statistics—
       so that’s unrelated to this issue.
    2. Did you get a chance to enable the Robot Threshold setting? Go to WP Statistics
       → Settings → General → Robot Threshold and set it
       to around 50. This is the 
       most effective way to filter out bot traffic automatically.
 * Also, we just released version 14.16.4 which includes an updated Device Detector
   library (6.5.0) with the latest bot detection rules. Please update the plugin
   and that should help catch most of these bots automatically.
 * Let us know how it goes!
 *  Thread Starter [Artan](https://wordpress.org/support/users/artankrasniqi1988/)
 * (@artankrasniqi1988)
 * [1 month, 2 weeks ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/started-counting-bots/#post-18879060)
 * hi,
 * we set set the Robot Threshold to 50 and collected data for around 3 weeks. in
   our case your plugin is not working anymore correctly to not count crawlers and
   bots. so the data is pretty useless to us. we don´t now why your plugin started
   to count all of the crawlers at a certain point… think it was the 3. of march
   when it started to happen. sadly the plugin is not of value for us anymore. in
   live traffic view we always see all the bots / crawler and our data is corrupted
   by that. the crawlers are searching our categorie pages and our filters… the 
   plugin just counts them in…
 *  Plugin Author [Mostafa Soufi](https://wordpress.org/support/users/mostafas1990/)
 * (@mostafas1990)
 * [1 month, 1 week ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/started-counting-bots/#post-18880649)
 * Hi [@artankrasniqi1988](https://wordpress.org/support/users/artankrasniqi1988/),
 * I’m really sorry the issue is still affecting you. I understand how frustrating
   it is when your data gets polluted.
 * Just to clarify how **Robot View Threshold** works: it only kicks in when a single
   IP generates many hits in one day. Modern crawlers spread their traffic across
   many different IPs, so no single IP crosses the threshold. That is why you still
   see them in Live Traffic even with the threshold set to 50. The plugin is working
   as designed, this traffic pattern just needs a different approach.
 * Here is what I recommend. All of these live under **Statistics → Settings → Filtering&
   Exceptions**:
    1. Add the specific bot user-agents manually under **Robot Exclusions → Custom 
       Bot Exclusions**. This is a textarea right above the Robot View Threshold field.
       Check your **Visitors** page for the user-agents of the traffic you believe 
       is bot traffic, and add one snippet per line (for example: `GPTBot`, `ClaudeBot`,`
       bytespider`, `ahrefs`). WP Statistics already filters common crawlers, but any
       new or custom UA needs to be added here.
    2. Block bot IPs under **IP Exclusions → Excluded IP Address List**. If you identify
       repeat offender IPs from the Visitors page, add them here (one per line).
    3. Stop tracking heavily crawled paths under **URL Exclusions → Excluded URLs**.
       It supports wildcards, for example `/category/*` or `/product-category/*`. This
       stops tracking those URL paths entirely. Note: it matches the URL path, not 
       query parameters.
    4. Enable **URL Exclusions → Excluded 404 Pages**. Bots often hit non-existent 
       URLs. Turning this on prevents those visits from being logged at all.
    5. Verify your real visitor IP is reaching WordPress. If you are behind Cloudflare
       or a reverse proxy and the real visitor IP is not being forwarded, Robot View
       Threshold sees only one IP for all traffic and cannot work correctly. On the**
       Visitors** page, check whether most visits show the same IP, that would indicate
       this problem.
 * Thanks again for your patience.
 * Best

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

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## Tags

 * [bots](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/bots/)
 * [counting](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/counting/)

 * 5 replies
 * 2 participants
 * Last reply from: [Mostafa Soufi](https://wordpress.org/support/users/mostafas1990/)
 * Last activity: [1 month, 1 week ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/started-counting-bots/#post-18880649)
 * Status: not resolved