Google Analytics counts bots as real traffic [New Test]

A controlled experiment simulated bot traffic to a test site using Puppeteer, testing three scenarios: obvious non-browser user-agents (PostmanRuntime), realistic browser user-agents, and requests from data center IPs. Google Analytics 4 recorded all simulated bot traffic as real visits across all three tests, even after its 48-hour data processing window. Plausible Analytics rejected all bot traffic in every scenario. The difference stems from Plausible blocking ~32,000 data center IP ranges, filtering by user-agent headers, and detecting unnatural traffic patterns automatically, while GA4 relies primarily on a known bot list (IAB) and requires manual configuration to catch unlisted bots.