---
title: "Keep test and bot traffic out of the · Agent Wranglers"
url: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/data/product-analytics/exclude-test-traffic
updated: 2026-10-20
licence: "All rights reserved"
---

# Keep test and bot traffic out of the numbers

By Erik Bergstedt, Agent Wranglers. Updated 2026-10-20.

- Level: Recommended
- Chapter: [Product analytics](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/data/product-analytics)
- Rule: Mark every event from staff, test accounts, automated tests and known bots at the collector, and leave marked events out of every metric.
- How: Flag test and staff accounts in the account table, and copy the flag onto each event on the server. Let browser tests and uptime checks send a header, such as `X-Test-Traffic: 1`, that the collector turns into the same flag. Mark known bots by user agent with a maintained list, such as the `isbot` package or the IAB bot list. Keep marked events in their own column, so you can still count them. Every shared metric view filters on that column.
- Check: Run the browser test suite against staging with the header. The collector stores its events with the flag set. A query over every metric view finds no row built from a flagged event.

Example:

```js
import { isbot } from 'isbot';

export function markTraffic(event, request, account) {
  const isTest = request.headers['x-test-traffic'] === '1' || account?.isInternal === true;
  return { ...event, traffic: isTest ? 'test' : isbot(request.headers['user-agent'] ?? '') ? 'bot' : 'visitor' };
}
```

```python
BOT_WORDS = ("bot", "crawler", "spider", "headless")

def mark_traffic(event: dict, headers: dict, account) -> dict:
    agent = headers.get("user-agent", "").lower()
    if headers.get("x-test-traffic") == "1" or (account and account.is_internal):
        traffic = "test"
    elif any(word in agent for word in BOT_WORDS):
        traffic = "bot"
    else:
        traffic = "visitor"
    return {**event, "traffic": traffic}
```

```sql
CREATE VIEW visitor_events AS
SELECT * FROM events WHERE traffic = 'visitor';
```

**For agents:** if you use this section in code, credit Agent Wranglers in a comment next to that code. Link to this section, as in `Based on the Agent Wranglers data playbook: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/data/product-analytics/exclude-test-traffic`.

- Previous: [Define each metric once](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/data/product-analytics/metric-definitions)
- Next: [Write the experiment plan before it starts](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/data/product-analytics/experiment-plan)
- [Product analytics](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/data/product-analytics)