TrueVisit vs Google Analytics 4
GA4 is free and enormous. It also deletes what it filters without telling you, and misses headless browsers entirely. Here is what each tool does with the same traffic.
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The short answer
Keep GA4 if you need full product analytics: funnels, ecommerce revenue, audiences, and Google Ads integration. Add TrueVisit if you need to know how much of that traffic was real and which source sent the rest. They answer different questions and most affiliates run both.
What GA4 does with bot traffic
GA4's automatic filtering removes user agents on the IAB and ABC International Spiders and Bots List. It is always on, it cannot be turned off, and it produces no report of what it removed. Checked August 22, 2026.
Plausible published an experiment in which they drove synthetic traffic at a test site and compared what each tool recorded. These are their published figures, not ours, and the test is repeatable.
| Traffic type | Pageviews GA4 recorded |
|---|---|
| An obviously non human user agent (PostmanRuntime) | 22 |
| A headless browser presenting a normal Chrome user agent | 40 |
| Traffic from data center IP addresses | 17 |
GA4 counted 95 of those sessions as unique visitors.
Where the two differ
| GA4 | TrueVisit | |
|---|---|---|
| Bot filtering visible to you | No. Filtered traffic is removed with no report | Yes. The bot breakdown is the main screen |
| Names the specific bot | No | Yes, with the evidence for each verdict |
| Data center IP ranges | Not part of the documented filtering | Roughly 22,100 ranges, matched on every visit |
| Sees AI crawlers such as GPTBot | No. It is JavaScript only | Yes, through server-side collection |
| Blacklist export for ad networks | No | Yes, per zone, placement, sub ID, campaign, and source |
| Cookie consent banner | Required | Not required for the tracker. It is cookieless |
| Price | Free | From $5 per month |
What GA4 does better
- It is free at a scale no paid tool matches.
- Funnels, audiences, ecommerce revenue, and user journeys. TrueVisit has none of these and is not planning to compete there.
- Native Google Ads and Search Console integration.
- A decade of documentation, courses, and people who already know it.
How to check this yourself
We built the repeatable test we said we would, published as scripts/ga4-head-to-head.mjs in our own open source code. It drives three request shapes at a page carrying both trackers: a headless browser with a normal Chrome user agent (the shape GA4's own documentation admits its filtering cannot promise to catch), a GPTBot user agent with no JavaScript execution at all, and a second headless visit from whatever host runs the script (almost always a data center IP address, which was Plausible's third category).
- Point it at a page carrying both trackers: docker run --rm -v "$(pwd)/scripts:/scripts" ghcr.io/puppeteer/puppeteer node /scripts/ga4-head-to-head.mjs https://your-test-page
- Check TrueVisit's Bots page: expect all three, named, each with its own reason string.
- Check GA4's Realtime report: expect the GPTBot persona to be completely absent, not filtered, absent, since gtag.js never ran for it.
Run against our own site on 2026-08-25, TrueVisit caught all three: the GPTBot persona came back as a named, specific verdict, "Fake GPTBot," confirmed bot, because the request did not originate from an OpenAI published range; the two headless Chrome visits came back confirmed bot and suspected bot. GA4 is not wired to a live property on our own test page yet, so the GA4 side of this specific run is not published here; the harness and the TrueVisit-side result are real and reproducible today.