Tips and how-to guides

What to do in the situations this product exists for, in the order you would actually work through them, including the parts where the honest answer is inconvenient.

• Block spam bots, scrapers, and AI crawlers in Cloudflare

  Your report says most of your traffic is crawlers. Here is the five minute version of acting on it, built for affiliate marketers and SEO publishers: tick the bots you want gone, copy the generated expression into Cloudflare, and watch them vanish from your realtime view. The guardrails keep you from blocking anything you would regret.

• How to read a bot traffic spike

  Traffic doubled overnight and most of it is flagged as bots. Here is the order to check things in, and the two mistakes that cost people money at this exact moment.

• Which traffic sources to cut first

  You have a list of sources and a bot percentage next to each. Cutting them in the wrong order costs more than not cutting at all.

• Stop your cache from hiding AI crawlers

  If your AI crawler numbers look impossibly low, your cache is probably answering those requests before anything can record them. This is fixable and costs your readers nothing.

• What to send an ad network for a refund

  Asking a network for credit is a documentation exercise, not an argument. What to include, what to leave out, and what to expect.

• Protecting an ad account from invalid traffic

  For publishers the risk is not wasted budget, it is the account itself. This is what to watch and when to act.

• How to tell if your website traffic is bots

  Something about the numbers feels wrong, but a feeling is not a finding. These are the five signs worth checking, ranked by how much each one actually proves, and the checks that turn a hunch into evidence.

• How to spot fake Googlebot traffic

  A user agent is a claim, not an identity. Anything can call itself Googlebot, plenty of things do, and the check that unmasks an impostor is public and takes seconds.

• Why your bounce rate suddenly hit 100 percent

  Real audiences are messy: some people click deeper, some do not. When every visit from one source behaves identically, the uniformity itself is the finding.

• What a spike in direct traffic usually means

  Direct traffic is every visit that arrived without saying where it came from. That makes a direct spike an unlabeled box, and the job is to label it before reacting to it.

• Referrer spam: what it is and how to stop it

  Referrer spam is advertising that uses your own analytics as the billboard: fabricated visits carrying a domain the spammer hopes you will get curious about and open.

• Why analytics and ad network numbers never match

  Some of the gap between clicks billed and visits counted is physics, some is measurement, and some is fraud. Getting money back depends on telling those three apart.

• Data center traffic: bots, VPNs, and how to tell

  Almost every bot runs in a data center, but not everyone in a data center is a bot. The difference between a signal and a verdict is what keeps the scoring honest.

• How to test a new traffic source before scaling

  The cheapest time to catch a bad source is before it gets real budget. This is the first week routine: what to tag, what to watch, and what disqualifies a seller.