Sometimes when I see programming experts trying to help new learners I imagine what would happen if we were a driving school:

"The gas pedal makes the car go, right?"

"Well, only if the engine is started, and not if you are out of gas, and not if the car is in neutral, and not if the car is parked against a wall, and not if the parking brake is on, and it shouldn't be called a gas pedal in an electric car, and, and, and...."

Google Analytics records bot traffic as real users — we tested it.
Plausible passed.

We created a test site, installed both GA4 and Plausible on it, and sent only bot traffic (simulating how bots visit a site in real life). The results will make GA4 users question their data.

Plausible successfully rejected the bot traffic and didn't record even a single "fake" pageview.

But Google Analytics got fooled again and again:

🧵