Vireo keeps bots out of your pageviews and visitors, and reports them separately so you can see what it left out.
How bots are recognised
- Over 800 known crawlers, AI trainers, SEO tools, uptime monitors and headless browsers, matched by user agent. Most of the list comes from Matomo Device Detector, plus a list Vireo keeps itself. The bot directory lists them.
- Requests with no user agent.
- Automated browsers that set the flags testing tools put on themselves, even when they claim to be Chrome.
- Pages a browser prefetched or prerendered without anyone looking at them.
- On Cloudflare, requests Cloudflare has marked as a verified bot or a likely threat.
Bots are recognised when they ask WordPress for a page, before any JavaScript runs, so crawlers that never run JavaScript are still counted.
What you see
The Overview reports how many requests Vireo kept out and the share of everything it saw, split into AI crawlers, search engines, SEO tools, uptime monitors, link previews, headless browsers, scripts and clients, archivers and validators, prefetch and prerender, and other bots.
Views from one visitor past the daily cap of five views of a page, or fifty in total, are reported as “Repeated views past the daily cap” instead of being counted as views.
Why your server logs show more
Log tools count every crawler, monitor and scraper as a visit. Vireo doesn’t, so its numbers are lower.
On a site with full-page caching, the bot figures themselves are lower than the real number of bot requests. A cached page is answered before WordPress runs, and nothing inside WordPress can see that request.
Test a user agent
Go to Vireo Analytics, Settings, Tracking, Bot filter test. Paste a user agent and click “Test User-Agent” to see whether Vireo counts it and how it’s classed.
Bot filtering is always on; there’s no setting to turn it off.