You Have a Mystery Traffic Problem
You open your Shopify analytics to review where your customers are coming from. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago — makes sense. And then, sitting somewhere in the middle of the list: Council Bluffs, Iowa.
No offense to Council Bluffs, but you don't sell there. You've never run an ad there. You have no idea why a city in western Iowa is generating significant session volume in your store.
Here's the thing: those aren't customers. They're bots. And they're quietly distorting the data you use to make real business decisions.
What Council Bluffs, Iowa Actually Is
Council Bluffs isn't a hotbed of DTC shoppers. It's a major data center hub. Google and several other large cloud providers run infrastructure there, which makes it a launching point for an enormous amount of automated web traffic: scrapers, AI crawlers, price monitors, SEO bots, and everything in between.
When these bots hit your Shopify store, they register as sessions just like a real visitor would. They inflate your traffic numbers, muddy your location data, and in some cases skew conversion rate calculations — because they're visiting but obviously never buying.
The Iowa data point is just the most visible symptom. Bot traffic is almost certainly affecting other parts of your reports too, just in ways that are harder to spot at a glance.
This Is a Growing Problem, Not a Niche One
A recent Forbes article on AI traffic in ecommerce put a number to something that most brand operators have sensed for a while: a significant and growing share of ecommerce web traffic is non-human. AI crawlers alone have scaled dramatically over the past two years as companies train models on web data, and your Shopify storefront is part of that web.
For a DTC brand trying to understand customer behavior, this matters. If 15 to 20 percent of your sessions are bots, your bounce rate, session duration, and traffic-by-channel numbers are all affected. You might be making decisions about ad spend, landing page performance, or regional targeting based on data that includes thousands of sessions from machines that were never going to buy anything.
Cleaning up your analytics is not a nice-to-have. It's a prerequisite for trusting what your data is telling you.
The Fix: Shopify's Bot Traffic Filter
In October, Shopify rolled out a built-in filter that lets you exclude bot sessions from your analytics reports. It works, it's straightforward, and it will make that Iowa data point disappear. The catch: it is not turned on by default. You have to opt in manually.
Here's how to do it.
Step-by-step: Filter bot traffic from your Shopify location reports
- Log in to your Shopify admin and navigate to Analytics > Reports.
- Find and open the Sessions by Location report.
- Click into the report's query editor — you'll see a filter bar at the top of the report that uses ShopQL, Shopify's built-in query language (think of it like a simple search filter, not code you need to write from scratch).
- The default query includes both human and bot sessions. Edit it to include Human sessions only, removing Bot from the filter.
- Run the updated report. Council Bluffs, Iowa should be gone entirely.
- Save the report as a new view — name it something like "Sessions by Location (No Bots)" — so you always have a clean version to reference going forward.
That's it. The whole thing takes about five minutes and gives you a materially more accurate picture of where your real traffic is coming from.
It's worth applying the same logic to other session-based reports on your dashboard. Any report that breaks down traffic by source, location, or behavior can benefit from having bots excluded.
Better Data, Better Decisions
Your analytics are only as useful as they are accurate. If you're running a growing DTC brand and using Shopify's native reporting to track performance, this is one of the fastest improvements you can make today without touching your store's code, your ad accounts, or anything else.
Implement the filter, save your clean reports, and start making decisions based on what real people are actually doing in your store.
If you want a second set of eyes on your Shopify analytics setup — or you're dealing with larger data quality issues across your reporting stack — that's exactly the kind of work we do. Reach out and we'll take a look.