Traffic Type filters let you narrow Analytics Dashboard data by the kind of traffic that generated it. Use them to separate human activity from automated traffic so you can get a clearer view of engagement patterns in both out-of-the-box Dashboards and custom Dashboards. This is especially useful for communities that rely on human-traffic trends to measure content reach, SEO performance, and community growth.
In this article, you'll learn both how to access these filters and understand their use.
Apply a Traffic Type filter
- Access the Dashboard and click the Analytics tab.
- Open the dashboard you want to review.
- Click the Filters button at the top left to display the Filter Dashboard dialog.
- Check one or more of the Traffic Type boxes.
- Optional: Select a Subcommunity and/or Category value to narrow the results further.
- Click Apply.
NOTE: Fine-tune your data insights by applying and removing a combination of these filters; click Clear All to remove all applied filters.
Traffic Type options
Traffic Type | What it includes | When to use it |
|---|
Search Engine Crawler | Bots that discover and index web pages for search results, such as Googlebot, Bingbot, and DuckDuckbot. | Review search engine crawl activity separately from user traffic. |
AI Crawler | Bots that crawl and scrape web content to train large language models or build AI datasets, such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and CCBot. | Measure or isolate AI training-related crawl activity. |
Archiver | Services that save snapshots of websites for historical records, such as Wayback Machine. | Identify archival traffic separately from current audience behavior. |
AI Assistant | Bots that power AI-driven assistant products that fetch web content to answer user queries in real time. | Understand assistant-driven retrieval traffic separately from browsing traffic. |
Likely Automated | Traffic Vanilla believes is automated but that doesn't match a known bot operator. | Separate unknown/non-human traffic from human visits and from named bot categories. |
Human User | Traffic from real people using your community. | Focus on actual visitor engagement and content consumption. |
Why use Traffic Type filters
- Separate human traffic from automated traffic without creating a separate dashboard from scratch.
- Get a cleaner read on engagement when you want to understand what real visitors viewed or did.
- Investigate spikes in traffic by checking whether crawlers, archivers, or assistants contributed to the increase.
- Pair Traffic Type with Category and/or Subcommunity to focus on a specific area of your community.
Tips
- If a dashboard looks unusually busy, compare Human User traffic against crawler or assistant traffic before drawing conclusions about audience engagement.
- If you need a broader reporting view, out-of-the-box Dashboards provide preconfigured analytics, while custom Dashboards let you build reporting around the data that matters most to you.