Do You Want Automated Traffic?

Blocking automated traffic from your analytics sounds like an easy decision.

But the more you peel back the onion, the more you realize it’s not that easy.

Automated traffic visiting your website could be exactly what you want to measure. For example, if AI is placing orders on your site on behalf of your customer? That’s pretty good to know.

I was talking with Manisha from our team about this, and we both use AI to help us with purchase decisions regularly. She uses AI to crawl websites and research gifts for her kids. By the time it's done, she just clicks the buy button. Real money changes hands. Mostly automated, but still a customer.

I did the same thing this summer. We were in Spain and wanted to enroll our son in a camp there for a few weeks. I let AI do all the legwork. I had it search for Spanish-speaking camps with international kids participating. I looked for camps where they could play sports, do fun activities, etc. It worked great, and he loved the camp he attended in Salamanca.

I do this all the time these days. I hand the research off entirely and come back for the pivotal decisions at the end.

That kind of automated traffic is genuinely good traffic. It represents a real person who is close to a real decision.

Some web hosts block AI crawlers by default. Blocking likely saves resources, but it can also make your products invisible to AI shoppers.

In that case, the only way AI can do research on someone's behalf is to open a browser and act as that person. So it creates a real browsing session, indistinguishable from a human visitor.

It's a cat-and-mouse situation. Just this year, AI agents using browsers have become a whole new category of website visitor.

Three things I'd suggest thinking about right now as we head into even more advancements in 2027:

1. Automated browsing is happening with sophisticated AI users at levels you wouldn’t have imagined last year.

2. Look at your own habits, or the habits of your most sophisticated customers. They're a small but growing minority right now, and they'll represent the majority in a year or two.

3. Get ahead of it. Tracking the most sophisticated users now gives you the data you need to sense trends and patterns of adoption, so you’re not blindsided when it becomes a significant portion of your traffic.

This is genuinely new territory that we’re learning about right now. New enough that I built an entire two-hour workshop around it.

If any of this is interesting to you and you want to get ahead of the curve, I'd love to have you join me for AI Traffic Control this Thursday, November 5, at 12 PM ET. Replay included if you can't make it live.

The point is to feel in control of AI traffic now and to have data to guide you as it keeps evolving.

To Your Measured Success!
–Jeff Sauer
CEO of MeasureU

New videos this week from MeasureU

• Installing Tracklution with Google Tag Manager (sponsored)
• Dead Internet Theory Just Showed Up in Your GA4 Reports

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Coming Up This Week at MeasureU

Workshop: AI Traffic Control

Thursday, November 5, 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM EST

Over half of all internet traffic is believed to be non-human, but how much of your traffic is fake, and what is it doing to your reports? Bots show up in more places than most marketers realize. Email security tools click campaign links, AI crawlers scrape websites, and automated tools can inflate traffic and engagement numbers without ever becoming customers.

Open to everyone: enroll in AI Traffic Control to join.

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