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I'm currently getting tens of thousands of hits from bots on my site and I'd like to filter that traffic from my Google Analytics reports.

The traffic comes without geo information, has 0:00 session time and is listed as (not set) in the country data. Looking back at my past data, there was nearly zero traffic from (not set) countries. Now there are tens of thousands of pageviews per day.

Is there a way to filter this (not set) traffic?

I've tried adding the regex exclude filters (not) and (not set) but that doesn't seem to work.

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Unfortunately dimensions reported as (not set) are not filterable. (not set) is what GA sends into the reports when data for that particular dimensions hasn't been tracked by GA.

Have you turned/checked on the bot filtering option in the View settings page?

What other dimensions have you checked for that particular traffic? Browser type, operating system, hostname, language, source/medium?

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  • Yes, thanks. I've got the bot traffic filtering option checked. That's not doing anything. The bot traffic is spoofing Chrome/Win, so there's no way to differentiate it. The only thing that seems to be identifiable is that it's 100's of thousands of pageviews which last <1second and bounce. My search volume has collapsed since this started -- which may be correlation and not causation, but the timing sure lines up. I could captcha challenge the whole site, but that seems like a drastic measure... I'm not quite there yet.
    – Bangkokian
    Commented Jul 19, 2020 at 10:01
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    No idea if the following regex will work in a View filter (it does work in segments and table filters within GA standard reports) ^[A-Z]
    – Bronwyn V
    Commented Jul 19, 2020 at 15:40

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