What causes these odd repeat “visitors” to our site?

Shopify Discussion

Topic summary

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:

  • For smaller stores, these bot visits significantly skew analytics and conversion metrics (up to 10-25% of total traffic for low-volume sites)
  • One user reported 3,000+ visits from Council Bluffs in 2025 alone
  • The visits don’t appear in Google Analytics but affect Shopify’s native analytics

Current Status:

  • Shopify support has provided inconsistent responses, sometimes denying it’s their bot
  • The feature cannot be disabled by store owners
  • Users recommend contacting Shopify Support to request the ability to control testing frequency (manual, daily, weekly, monthly, or annual options)
  • A workaround exists: filtering out Council Bluffs traffic in Shopify Analytics reports by creating custom filtered views

Unresolved: Store owners want Shopify to make speed testing optional or provide transparency about the feature.

Summarized with AI on October 28. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
9

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.

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