Whatstuffwherebot user agent messing up Google Analytics

[ahirai]

Starting yesterday, Aug 26, 2020, I noticed a new bot crawling our site with user agent whatstuffwherebot.

Google Analytics is counting these hits as human traffic, completely throwing off my numbers - yesterday, Analytics reported nearly triple my typical number of visitors.

As of now, Search Console only shows data through Aug 25 so I don't know if Search Console is also affected.

Is anybody else seeing something similar?

Does anybody know what the whatstuffwherebot bot is? I don't get any results when I search on Google or Bing.

For what it's worth, the traffic is coming from Columbus, OH, running over Amazon AWS via 278 different IP addresses so far. Also, WordFence (my WordPress security plugin) correctly identifies these hits as bot traffic.

[ahirai]

Hi Martijn,

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, I've enabled bot filtering on all views except my unfiltered view. My site gets so much bot traffic that the data would be unusable without it.

As for filtering the traffic, I'm not aware of any way to retroactively filter out User-Agent unless I use GTM to create a custom dimension as described here: https://www.addsearch.com/docs/analytics/addsearch-bot-google-analytics/

Perhaps this is something I should do in case something like this ever happens again in the future.
I'm still hoping for other suggestions - particularly ways to ask the Google Analytics team to include "whatstuffwherebot" as part of their bot filtering.

Best,
Akira

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Akira,

Have you enabled bot filtering as a setting in Google Analytics on a view level? If not, you could always add a filter on the property or account level to filter out the traffic if it has very common patterns as you're describing. Usually, I would just stay away, from filtering out this type of traffic though if you have large amounts of traffic as otherwise you might be doing more harm to your data long-term than helping it.

Martijn.