Cookiebot website traffic cookie scanner

I see (unusual) spikes in website traffic on my website – is it caused by the Cookiebot scanner?

The Cookiebot scanner crawls your website – within 24 hours – to scan all cookies and tracking technologies in use on your domain.

In order to have the least possible impact on your website’s performance, the scanner only sends one request every 2 seconds.

The scanner simulates a number of regular website users visiting your website. You can think of it as a simulation of say e.g. 7-8 users simultaneously visiting the website and going through all the subpages, clicking all the links, menu points and buttons, playing embedded videos and taking all the actions possible – in other words doing everything that it is possible for a website visitor to do on the website being scanned while at the same time identifying cookies and trackers in use. The only thing the Cookiebot scanner does not do is fill in forms (like subscribing to your newsletter) and pay for goods in a shopping cart (if you have a webshop, the scanner will place items in the shopping cart but will not proceed and pay for those items).

The scans are conducted this way to ensure that all cookies and trackers that a regular user could possibly encounter on your website are found.

What can I do to prevent this spike in traffic?

There is no other way to do the scans, so you cannot prevent the traffic from happening. You can, however, exclude the traffic from your regular website statistics by either excluding the provider ‘microsoft corporation’ or by excluding the IP addresses that Cookiebot scans from:

13.74.44.241
40.91.211.73
52.232.29.198
23.100.63.22

More information about how to exclude certain IP addresses from Google Analytics can be found in Google’s own Analytics support area.