I thought I had 1,087 visitors and 26 leads. 41% were bots and 23 leads were one bot.
I run projectcostestimator.com , a free website-cost calculator with a 9-engine pricing model and an open CC BY 4.0 dataset. This week I sat down to figure out why a site with "decent" traffic was making $0 — and found out most of my dashboard was fiction. Here's exactly how, with the queries, because you probably have the same problem and don't know it. The numbers I believed GA4 said 1,087…
Projectcostestimator.com owner discovered a significant discrepancy in their website analytics, with 41% of all Google Analytics 4 (GA4) sessions appearing to be generated by a single bot. The bot used a residential IP pool, visiting the site via a hero form and an API-key endpoint, exhausting the 26 leads that had been captured.
The investigation revealed that 23 of these leads shared the same user-agent across 45 distinct IP addresses. After excluding this bot traffic, the actual number of genuine leads dropped to zero. The author implemented a strict lead counter, user-agent checks, and a daily reconciliation guard. They also blocked the API-key endpoint to prevent misuse.
The author stresses the importance of validating identity, not just movement, when assessing website traffic.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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