As many know today’s browsers in mobile phones and elsewhere allow for pre-fectching web pages.
I presume this means that even if a user does not willingly visit a site, as long as that site is on their bookmarks or cookies or whatever, Matomo may log a “hit” from that user, even though they may have not knowingly clicked on that site as a destination - the prefetching is making it look like a hit…
MTM uses also JavaScript, so the impact would be the same as Matomo generated JavaScript code.
I think you can try to create a page (URL-1 - that you are sure Google won’t crawl) with one image (URL-2) and some JavaScript that sends an HTTP request to an URL-3…
Then use the prefetch of your mobile browser, and check on the server log if URL-1, URL-2 and URL-3 are hit or not…
If you don’t have an access to the server log, try do it with Matomo (still on pages that people and Google won’t know in order to not pollute your test)…
Thank you Philippe - I will try to get that done and report back.
I do have full access to server logs and am wondering - when prefetching is in use doesn’t the visitor’s device send some special headers or something that I should be able to view in the logs? That could be another way to figure this out, no?