For a while now, I have been getting many views/carts/checkouts daily from this same location in Kansas. They are not showing up in logs or as real carts/checkouts. Assuming these are bot views? Anything to be worried about? Can these sessions affect the real sessions on a site? It feels like when I get an influx of these fake sessions, the next day sessions are low.
Yes, most likely bots
If you see a lot of sessions coming again and again from one location with no real orders or proper cart activity, it’s usually bot traffic. A place like “Kansas” can often be a data center or proxy location. Bots use VPNs or proxies, so the location shown in analytics is not always their real location.
Should you worry?
In most cases, this is not a big threat, but there are a few things to keep an eye on:
- Analytics issues — bots increase your session numbers and reduce your conversion rate, making it hard to understand real customer behavior
- Checkout bots — if bots reach checkout, they might be testing stolen cards. Check for unusual failed payments or small transactions
- Inventory blocking — some bots add products to cart and don’t buy, which can affect limited-stock items
- App costs — if you use apps that charge per visitor, bot traffic can increase your costs
Can bots affect real users?
Not directly — bots don’t block real users or replace them. But the pattern you noticed (more bots → fewer real users next day) could have some reasons:
-
Bots may use server resources and slow down your store, causing real users to leave
-
It could just be random or normal traffic variation
-
If bots are very active, Shopify’s Cloudflare protection might limit traffic from some regions, which can sometimes affect real users too
What you can do
-
First, clean your analytics — go to reports and filter only “Human” sessions to get correct data (this works for data after Oct 7, 2025)
-
Enable hCaptcha in your Shopify settings to reduce bot activity on forms and logins
-
Monitor failed payments to check if card testing is happening
-
If you want to actually block bots, use a third-party app, since Shopify doesn’t provide direct IP or country blocking
-
Shopify already blocks many harmful bots at the server level, so the ones you see are usually more advanced bots, not simple attacks
Thank You
that’s bot traffic — kansas shows up because it’s the geographic center of the US, which is the default geolocation when an IP can’t be resolved properly. super common with bots and scrapers.
check if those sessions have zero engagement time in GA4. if they do, you can filter them out with a data filter on country or by excluding that IP range. also worth checking if your consent banner is set up — some bots trigger events before consent loads.