How do I go about stopping all these bots coming from Ashburn, United States. It’s driving me mad as it’s making all my analytics look wrong. I’m thinking I have potential customers online when infact it’s just a bot!!
Topic summary
Multiple Shopify store owners report inflated analytics from bot traffic originating in Ashburn, Virginia—a major Amazon AWS data center hub. The issue creates misleading session counts (sometimes 1,400+ sessions) that distort customer analytics and active cart metrics.
Root Cause:
Ashburn hosts extensive AWS infrastructure, causing bots and crawlers to route through that location and register as visitors.
Proposed Solutions:
- Traffic blocking apps (Traffic Guard, Blockify, Shop Protector): Can block content display but don’t prevent sessions from appearing in Shopify Analytics
- Google Analytics filtering: Create data filters excluding Ashburn city or AWS IP ranges to clean reporting without stopping actual traffic
- Enable bot filtering in GA4/Universal Analytics to exclude known bots and spiders
Key Limitation:
Shopify doesn’t allow server-level firewall rules to block traffic by location. Users express frustration that Shopify hasn’t addressed this platform-wide issue, forcing individual merchants to implement workarounds that may impact legitimate customers.
The discussion remains open with no definitive solution that both stops the traffic and cleans analytics data.
3 Likes
Hi @Karen_Dorn ,
I am sorry to hear that you’re having this issue and know that spam visitors can make it harder to accurately review your store’s analytics. It is possible to restrict traffic to your storefront through the use of apps, but it can be a difficult balancing act between blocking spammers while allowing genuine customers and visitors through to your site.
I’d recommend Traffic Guard as potential solution, as it allows you to block traffic from specific locations and IP addresses. There are other apps you could take a look at, but I wanted to recommend this one as it should allow you to more specifically target these spam visitors. Please feel free to browse the Shopify App Store to get a better idea of your options.
Hi Victor
I am having the same problem today, over 1400 sessions all from shopify in Ashburn USA. Why are you saying it is spammers when it is coming from a shopify site? This needs tobe stopped, and soon!
Kind regards
Sandra Mitchell
4 Likes
I agree. Shopify needs to deal with the bots on a larger scale. In addition to this Ashburn problem, I also have thousands of ‘active carts’ sometimes due to bots. Shopify’s only solution after wasting hours of my time was that I need to install things or make things harder on actual customers… like making them login to even browse.
Shopify you need to fix the bot problem on YOUR end. : (
5 Likes
I have the same issue.
Hi everyone,
Starting this month, we’ve been seeing a large number of sessions coming from Ashburn, VA. At first, Shopify Support suggested resyncing our store and refreshing the theme. We tried that, but the issue came back after a few days.
We also tested apps like Blockify and others, but they only block website content—not the actual traffic. So even though we blocked the Ashburn location through these apps, Shopify Analytics still shows those sessions.
Has anyone else experienced this, and do you know a reliable way to stop or filter out this bot traffic? Any suggestions would be really appreciated!
1 Like
Hi @Karen_Dorn ,
I hope you are well!
Basically, it happens due to the following reasons
1.) Shopify stores often see inflated traffic from Ashburn that is not real customers.
2.) Ashburn, VA is a huge Amazon AWS data center hub, and lots of bots/crawlers route through there.
Now, what you can do on Shopify:
1.) Filter in Google Analytics (or GA4):
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If you use GA, go to Admin → Data Settings → Data Filters → Create Filter.
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Create an exclude filter for:
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City = “Ashburn”
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OR IP ranges that belong to AWS (can be found online, though it’s broad).
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This won’t stop the bots, but it cleans your reports so your marketing decisions aren’t skewed.
2.) Bot Filtering Apps (optional):
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Apps like Blockify, Shop Protector, or Bot Blocker let you block or throttle suspicious traffic by region/IP.
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Useful if the bots are not only inflating analytics but also straining your bandwidth or checkout.
3.) Enable “Bot Filtering” in GA (Universal Analytics or GA4):
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GA has a native setting to “Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders.”
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This removes most AWS bot traffic, though some sneak through
What you can’t do (on Shopify)
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You can’t directly block traffic by city at the server level (Shopify doesn’t allow firewall-like rules).
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You can’t stop AWS bots from ever hitting your site, but you can make sure they don’t pollute your data.