Pendo typically recommends using the Exclude List to keep your product usage analytics clean of unwanted data. However, there's currently no comprehensive way to exclude bot activity specifically.
This article provides suggestions to consider for excluding bots from your usage data.
Exclude List
When you add an item to your subscription's Exclude List, Pendo continues to collect events and show guides, but the excluded events only appear in the Excluded Accounts & Visitors segment in Pendo.
- Exclude by IP. If you notice bot activity coming from a specific IP address, add it to the Exclude List.
- Exclude by Visitor ID or Account ID. If you notice particular visitors (or accounts) with abnormally high event counts and suspect they might be bots, you can add specific Visitor IDs (or Account IDs) to the Exclude List. Whenever possible, we recommend using wildcards (*) to exclude a certain Visitor ID (or Account ID) pattern.
Mark as Do Not Process
If you suspect specific visitors or accounts could be a bot, you could mark those visitors or accounts as Do Not Process (GDPR). When this is enabled, Pendo stops collecting events for that visitor or account and stops displaying guides to that visitor or account.
You can modify the Do Not Process (GDPR) flag on individual records in the Details section of the Visitor Details and Account Details pages.
You can also enable this flag using the API. To learn more, see our API documentation.
Conditional initialization
If your application can recognize that a visitor might be a bot, your developers can add conditional logic around the Pendo code to determine whether or not Pendo should initialize (turn on and start collecting data and displaying guides). To learn more, see Conditionally initialize Pendo.
Submit or vote on feature requests
You can create a new Pendo Feedback request or you can vote on some of the existing feature requests we have related to more comprehensive methods for excluding bot activity in your usage data. To learn more, see Give product feedback to Pendo.