Did you recently notice a big chunk of “traffic” in Shopify coming from Council Bluffs, Ashburn, or Columbus? You didn’t suddenly go viral in the Midwest. This guide explains why these locations show up, how bot traffic affects your conversion rate, and how to filter it so you can see what’s actually happening in your store.
…you’re usually looking at bot traffic or automated services running out of large cloud data centers. These “visits” are often:
Search engine crawlers indexing your site
Shopify or app integrations pinging your store
Security tools and fraud prevention checks
Less-helpful scrapers and low-quality bots
The problem: Shopify counts most of these as sessions, so they show up in your analytics and drag down your conversion rate. The rest of this article walks you through which bots matter, which don’t, and how to see the real performance of your store.
The data centers behind Council Bluffs, Ashburn, and Columbus
These three locations are home to some of the world’s largest cloud providers. That’s why they appear in so many Shopify dashboards.
Council Bluffs, Iowa (Google Cloud)
Google operates one of its largest data centers in Council Bluffs
(see Google’s data center overview).
Traffic from here often comes from:
Googlebot crawling your site for search (official docs)
Google Ads and Shopping feed checks
Other services running on Google Cloud Platform
Ashburn, Virginia (AWS + Cloudflare)
Ashburn is sometimes called “the internet’s main intersection.” It hosts major hubs for:
Providing logs so you can see what’s being blocked
What Blockify can’t do
Remove historical bot sessions from Shopify Analytics
Block essential crawlers like Google, Bing, or Pinterest (nor should it)
Eliminate 100% of bots
Verdict: Blockify is useful for security and fraud prevention.
It’s not a replacement for clean analytics setup. You still need filters if you want
accurate reporting and conversion rates.
How bots skew your conversion rate
Bots don’t behave like real shoppers:
Most don’t check out, and while some advanced bots can add to cart, they don’t behave like real customers.
They may hit multiple pages within seconds.
They often come from the same data-center networks or locations.
Shopify still counts many of these as sessions, so your traffic goes up while your
conversion rate goes down.
Quick example
Imagine you have:
500 real visitors
400 bot visitors
10 orders
Shopify shows:
10 ÷ 900 = 1.1% conversion rate
But your actual human conversion rate is:
10 ÷ 500 = 2%
That’s a big difference when you’re deciding whether your product pages,
metafields,
or campaigns are “working.”
How to filter bot traffic in Shopify
Shopify’s standard Analytics overview doesn’t let you filter out bots. But the
Custom Reports / Explore tool does.
(Shopify’s analytics docs).
Build a clean traffic report in Shopify
Go to Analytics → Reports → New exploration.
Choose a Sessions or Sessions over time report as
your starting point.
Add filters to exclude:
Session City in not Council Bluffs, Iowa
Session City in not Ashburn, Virginia
Session City in not Columbus, Ohio
Session duration less than or equal to 3 seconds
Device type equals Unknown
Referrer contains “undefined” or other obviously bad sources
Save the report as something like
“Clean Sessions (Bot-Filtered)”.
Use this report as your main source of truth for conversion rate and traffic trends.
When you compare the default Shopify dashboard to this clean report, your conversion rate
will almost always improve—and the story your data tells will feel much closer to reality.
Shopify is always adding new features, and as I am writing this blog, I just noticed they added a new Human or Bot Session filter. Read more about it here »
What you should actually do
Here’s a simple summary you can work through step by step:
Create a bot-filtered report in Shopify. Use it as your main reference for conversion rate and traffic.
Monitor bot-heavy cities monthly. Patterns change over time; check in and adjust filters as needed.
Install Blockify only if you’re seeing malicious behavior. Things like:
Login attempt spikes
Checkout spam
Cart spam
Sudden 2,000+ pageview bursts from “unknown” devices
Never block good SEO crawlers. They’re essential for organic traffic, social previews, and product feeds.
Once your data is clean, you can confidently work on the fun stuff: improving product content,
building reusable blocks with metafields and metaobjects, and tightening up UX—all things I cover in
more depth in my other Shopify guides on
metafields and
reusable content.
