On this page

Block bot web traffic

If you track events on public, unauthenticated websites, bot web traffic from crawlers, scrapers, and similar tools can affect your metrics. Amplitude Data lets you use a block filter to prevent that data from being ingested.

How bot blocking works

Amplitude blocks bot traffic based on User-Agent, as identified by the IAB/ABC International Spiders and Bots List. Blocking applies by default to data sent through the legacy JavaScript SDK or the TypeScript Browser SDK (version 1.10.0 and later). You can also provide the user_agent field directly on events sent through the HTTP API or Batch API. Be careful when doing this, because the value must represent a valid browser or Amplitude drops the event.

You can't recover data that a block filter removes, because Amplitude never ingests it.

Create a block filter for bot web traffic

To create a block filter for bot web traffic, follow these steps:

  1. Make sure you're on main. Filters aren't accessible from any other branch.

  2. In the left-hand sidebar, click Filters, then select the Block Filters tab.

  3. Click + Create Block Filter to open the Filter Configuration fly-out panel.

  4. Select Bot Traffic from the Block drop-down.

  5. When you're ready, click Block Data to start the block filter.

Was this helpful?