Started counting bots

Hi @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!

Hi @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!

Hi @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