Displaying robots in Yandex Metrica

Robots are programs that crawl the site for a specific purpose. For example, for indexing a site or checking its operation. Some robots introduce themselves, while others, on the contrary, try to disguise themselves as a real user so that analytical systems do not detect them. Yandex Metrica identifies robots based on behavioral factors and other technical signals.
  1. How to understand which robots visit the site
  2. How to compare statistics with and without robot data

Filtering robots in Yandex Metrica reports helps you get accurate data. For example, bounce rate, time on site, and page depth.

How to understand which robots visit the site

Note. If robot filtering by behavior is enabled in the tag settings, additional robot filtering settings are not available.

You can use robot filtering by behavior if you use the Yandex Metrica Logs API and you need non-aggregated data without robots. In other cases, change the data display mode in reports as described below.

Robots that have introduced themselves (their User-agent is known) are immediately excluded from the statistical data. You can view them in the Robots report. It will help you determine, for example, whether search robots come to the site to index pages. See How to check that a robot belongs to Yandex.

You can configure the display of robot sessions that are determined by behavior. By default, statistics are displayed without taking these sessions into account.

You can track the percentage of robots filtered by behavior:

In reports

Use the metric "Percentage of robots". To add it, in the report Data settings, select with robots. After that, the Percentage of robots metric in reports option will be enabled and the metric will appear in the data table.

You can add thePercentage of robots metric even if the option is disabled. To do this, click Metrics in the report and select Behavior → Percentage of robots.

On the Summary page
Use the Data setting:
  • Without robots: The default setting.
  • With robots: Select this option for the data to be recalculated taking robot sessions into account.
You can also use the widget:
  • Traffic quality → Dynamics of indicators → Percentage of robots.
  • Traffic volume → Total volume → Percentage of robotic sessions.

How to compare statistics with and without robot data

To compare statistics, in the report in the Data: without robots setting, select Compare with data with robots. This way you can see how robots affect your site. For example, robots may be the reason for a decrease in page depth and an increase in bounce rates.