Every founder loves to brag about traffic. “We hit 100k visitors last month.” Sounds great until you realize a third of web traffic is bots. According to Imperva’s 2024 Bad Bot Report, nearly one out of every three visits online isn’t human.
Congrats, you just grew your audience of crawlers, scrapers, and fake clicks.
The reality is traffic doesn’t pay your bills. Bots don’t swipe credit cards, they don’t invite teammates, and they definitely don’t stick around. Which is why Product-Led Growth (PLG) matters more than ever. PLG cuts through the noise and forces you to focus on what actually matters: real humans hitting value inside your product.
Traffic is easy to celebrate because it looks good on a chart. Investors love hockey-stick graphs, right? The problem is that raw traffic is one of the noisiest signals you can track.
Bots inflate numbers across SEO, ads, and even social platforms. Some of them scrape your content, some test vulnerabilities, others are just junk crawling around the web. They make your dashboards look busy but add zero value.
Celebrating traffic without context is like celebrating spam emails in your inbox. It feels big, but it’s useless.
Here’s the part most teams forget: bots don’t sign up, activate, or convert. You could have 100k visitors and still end up with zero meaningful users if half of that traffic isn’t real.
Even worse, fake traffic screws up your funnel math. Your conversion rates look broken, your retention charts make no sense, and you start solving the wrong problems.
PLG fixes this because it forces you to look at what real humans are doing inside the product. A bot can click around, but it can’t set up a project in Notion or send a Slack message.
The beauty of PLG is that it’s built on usage, not hype. You’re not measuring impressions or pageviews, you’re measuring behavior.
Bots can fake traffic but they can’t fake product value. Which is why PLG metrics are the ultimate filter.
If a third of web traffic is bots, then traffic can’t be your north star. Here are the metrics that actually prove growth:
These metrics are bot-proof. They tell you if humans actually care about your product.
Most analytics dashboards still obsess over pageviews and traffic spikes. They don’t do a great job of filtering out automated visits, which means you’re often making decisions on bad data.
There are guides like SpiderAF’s walkthrough on filtering bot traffic in GA4 and DataDome’s approach to excluding bots, but even with filters, a huge amount of automated noise still slips through.
If you’re measuring success on traffic alone, you’re not measuring success at all.
The analytics industry is still behind here. Most tools weren’t built to handle the scale of bot traffic we see today, and their default filters are weak. As Lukas Oldenburg pointed out, “common approaches to bot filtering” often fail completely, leaving you with dashboards full of junk data.
At Roaarrr, our mission is to help founders cut through this noise. Traffic is full of bots, fake clicks, and empty signals. What really matters is the product funnel: who activated, who retained, who paid, and who expanded. Roaarrr is built to make that clarity simple.
How much web traffic is bots in 2025?
Reports estimate around 30 percent or more. Some studies even put it closer to half.
Why can’t I just measure traffic?
Because traffic doesn’t equal growth. It just shows noise at the top of the funnel.
How do I know if my analytics are inflated by bots?
Check if your conversion rates make no sense. Huge traffic spikes with no signups are usually a red flag.
What’s the best way to filter out bots?
Focus on product usage. Bots don’t activate, retain, or pay.
Traffic is not growth. It’s noise, and a third of it is probably fake. Bots don’t care about your funnel, your onboarding, or your pricing page.
Real growth comes from real people finding value in your product. That’s why PLG wins. It filters the noise and forces you to track what matters: humans activating, retaining, and paying.
At Roaarrr, we believe founders need less noise and more clarity. That means ignoring fake traffic and focusing on product usage as the true signal of growth.
👉 Stop celebrating traffic. Start measuring funnels.