Multiple Shopify store owners report receiving mysterious daily visits from Council Bluffs, Iowa—typically 3 simultaneous sessions hitting the homepage, a collection page, and a product page. Some also see traffic from Ashburn, Virginia and previously from Boardman, Oregon.
Root Cause Identified:
The traffic originates from Shopify’s Site Speed Report feature, which uses Google’s data center in Council Bluffs to test store performance daily. The tool runs automated tests comparing site speed against similar Shopify stores.
Impact on Store Owners:
Current Status:
Unresolved: Store owners want Shopify to make speed testing optional or provide transparency about the feature.
We are a very small chocolate company and sell our bars only online. We have had 1,000 visitors to our site in the 7 weeks since we opened which is great! For the last 10 days we get 3 “visitors” at the same time from the same place… Council Bluffs Iowa - which is no where near us. Always 3… always at the exact same time. It seems like some type of robot that’s logging in each day from 3 different addresses. Anyone have any ideas if we should be concerned? Is it some type of bot?
thanks!
Erin
I’ve noticed the exact same thing with my store. Almost every day for the last few weeks I’ve been getting views from Council Bluffs IA.
I assume it’s some sort of bot as well, but I’m not sure why…
Must be another bot, like “Boardman Oregon” from a few months back:
I’m having the same creepy 3 visits from Council Bluffs every day. I’m afraid this is some sort of spyware or something… creepy!
Do you guys use Google ads ? Because Google has their data centre in Council Bluffs.
I’ve been getting the same 3 hits each day from a site in Council Bluffs too, I’m not even in the US so it’s a bit strange to see this. The hits are coming at random times but landing on the same 3 pages each day, a product page, a collection page and my homepage.
Nothing ever comes of it so I am pretty sure it’s harmless, but it has definitely piqued my curiosity. It’s highly likely to be a bot, I am very curious now as to what for?
The only issues I have had to date is with spammers getting my email address from the contact page so I turned it into a web-form and removed my email address, bots do leave occasional messages but it’s nowhere near as frequent and annoying as being put on an email list. Other times an SEO “genius” will run my site through an SEO analyser and send me the results and a spiel trying to sell me their marketing services. I can tell what is happening with those, the Council Bluffs hits on the other hand are perplexing.
This is most likely googles site crawler, I think their server is in Council Bluffs.
I also have the same issue. It used to the bot from Boardman, Oregon and now it is from Council Bluff, IA. I have also noticed creation of two fake customer accounts.
I have done some testing and found this is caused by Shopify’s new Site Speed Report feature. I have written more about it in the post here;
https://community.shopify.com/c/Online-Store-Speed/Online-Store-Speed-Report/m-p/908894#M390
Make sure you contact Shopify Support and get them to change the feature if it is affecting you.
Thank you, I will look into it.
I’m having them almost daily with numerous sessions…council bluffs
The same thing has been happening to me and I messaged shopify and they have assured me it not their bot, I also spoke to google and they have confirmed its not their bots either.
I have been doing some research and found out the cause, the Shopify Speed Report.
There are two other topics about this here; https://community.shopify.com/c/Online-Store-Speed/Online-Store-Speed-Report/m-p/908894#M390 or here; https://community.shopify.com/c/Shopify-Discussion/Council-Bluffs-visits/td-p/846963
Shopify runs the speed report using a Google Developer tool (the Google data centre is based in Council Bluffs, USA) which tests 3 pages, Homepage, a popular collection page and a popular product page. Shopify then compares this result to other similar Shopify sites. This test is run daily!
For some sites this is not a problem, but for some smaller sites this can screw with your analytics and conversion rate metrics. If you get 3000 hits a day, 3 extra visits is not an issue - it’s only 0.1%. Not every site is as big as that. My site is small and sometimes gets tested twice in one day for some reason. If you use Google Analytics you can exclude these visits from the report. I do not trust Google with my data as I have caught them doing things with my data before, and these visits are messing with the analytics in Shopify.
I have raised this with Shopify Support a few times and each time they have “forwarded it to the Development Team” but it seems its not a priority for them.
So if this feature is negatively affecting you, make sure to reach out to Shopify and ask them to turn it off. If more people bring it up, it may get resolved sooner.
Better yet ask them to give you, the store owner, the choice of when or if your site is tested. Manually, Daily, Weekly, Monthly or Annually.
I’m certain it’s Shopify measuring the speed of the site, strange that support would deny this. It sounds to me like a default lvl1 response to the word “bot” without actually investigating (which is typical of my experience with their frontline support).
The hits started coming through when they introduced the speed measurement and was confirmed on another board as being from Shopify. This discussion has some more information on it:
https://community.shopify.com/c/Online-Store-Speed/Online-Store-Speed-Report/td-p/907165
How else are are they able to measure the speed of the store without crawling sites?
The hit’s aren’t impacting anything (and aren’t showing up in Google Analytics) so there isn’t a big concern with having 3 daily hits.
I just found these posts and realize I am not alone in receiving these 3 simultaneous “visitors”! How did you find out where they come from ? I’m in Canada and all I can glean from this is that all three are from the U.S. and all are from mobile devices. I reported this to Shopify but was basically told it was nothing to worry about. I did not get an explanation.
Thanks,
Lynda
Thank you for this response. The cities for me are Council Bluffs Iowa (like you) and Ashburn Virginia. Both are not metropolitan areas so wasnt making any sense how I received more visits from those two cities than anywhere else in the entire world. Im getting up to 10 a day and I only see about 100 in visits per day so thats 10 percent of total visits coming from the bot?
I had a visitor from Boardman Oregon, but they were hacking my account and messing with my products.
Hi @mte10 ,
If you read through the post I have explained what it is. Its a Bot, the Shopify Speed Test. You can find this test and the result under - Sales Channel > Online Store > Themes
https://((yourdomain)).myshopify.com/admin/reports/online_store_speed
This is a site speed test that is run daily by @Shopify_77 using Google’s Data Centre in Council Bluffs.
You cant turn it off, you cant stop it.
My view that I have made in previous posts it that Shopify make this speed test optional for site owners and give us the choice of when its tested.
If that is something you would like to see happen it is important that you let @Shopify_77 know by contacting Shopify Support and let them know. Quote this thread and let them know your preference.
Bots are a serious problem and @Shopify_77 should do something about it, the more people that contact them about this, the more likely they are to do something about it.
I have had almost 25% of my traffic from Bots in the last 30 days, from Council Bluffs, Ashburn and some unknown sources.
Seriously @Shopify_77 , sort it out please.
We asked Shopify to stop the test. We have since seen hits going up from 3-5 a day to over 50+…
Not happy with the way it is being handled. Shopify says we have to reach out to Google… It is first from reading one of the answers below that I understand it is a Shopify tool (using Google servers). I just don’t understand why Shopify don’t see this being an issue?