AI Assistants counting as "normal" visitors

Feature Suggestions
1

Title:
Exclude AI Assistant sessions from default visitor statistics while keeping them available in dedicated AI reports

Description:

First of all, I really appreciate the new AI Assistant detection in Matomo. It is a great addition and provides valuable insight into how AI assistants interact with websites.

However, I would like to request an additional option.

Current behaviour

Visits generated by AI Assistants (for example Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity running in a browser) are included in the default visitor statistics and KPIs.

This becomes problematic for website owners who actively use AI assistants to analyse, review or test their own websites. A single development or optimisation session can generate many page views and visits that are not representative of real human audience behaviour.

Feature request

Please add an optional setting such as:

“Exclude AI Assistant sessions from standard reports while keeping them available in AI reports.”

When enabled:

  • AI Assistant visits would not affect default metrics such as:

    • Visits

    • Pageviews

    • Bounce Rate

    • Average Visit Duration

    • Conversion Rate

  • AI Assistant activity would still be stored and fully accessible in the dedicated AI reports.

  • Users could enable or disable this behaviour depending on their needs.

Why this is useful

AI-generated browsing is fundamentally different from genuine visitor traffic.

Many website owners now use AI assistants during:

  • website testing

  • SEO analysis

  • content reviews

  • accessibility checks

  • technical debugging

…and can do this for other website owners…

These sessions are valuable to analyse separately, but they can significantly distort marketing KPIs if they are mixed with normal visitor traffic.

Providing this as an optional setting would give users the best of both worlds:

  • accurate visitor statistics

  • complete AI analytics

Thank you for considering this suggestion.
I believe this will become increasingly important as AI-assisted browsing becomes more common.

When I am wrong, please inform me how I can exclude and count these hits separately. Thanks.

2

I support this idea. As AI assistants become more common for website testing, SEO reviews, and content validation, including those sessions in standard reports can make it harder to measure real user behavior. Having an optional setting to exclude AI assistant traffic from core KPIs while keeping it available in dedicated AI reports would give much cleaner analytics without losing valuable insights. This would be especially useful for teams that regularly use AI tools during development and QA.

3

Good suggestion. AI assistant traffic can easily distort normal visitor metrics, especially during testing and analysis. A built-in option to exclude these sessions from standard reports while keeping them in AI reports would make Matomo analytics much cleaner. For now, a custom segment may be the best workaround.

4

Sensible request, and it’s only going to matter more as AI-assisted browsing grows. Mixing agent sessions into bounce rate and visit duration really does skew the human-behavior picture, especially for owners testing their own sites repeatedly. Keeping them in dedicated AI reports but out of default KPIs is the right split. In the meantime you might approximate it with a segment excluding known AI user agents, though a native toggle would be far cleaner. Hope Matomo picks this up.

5

Agreed. AI sessions are useful data, but mixing them with real visitor traffic can distort KPIs. An option to exclude them from standard reports while keeping them in dedicated AI reports would be ideal.