Search engine crawlers, link-checking tools, your own office network, and even your own browser can pollute your click reports with visits that aren’t real audience engagement. Pretty Links gives you several ways to filter that noise out.
Find these settings at Tableau de bord > Pretty Links > Options > Rapports.
Built-In Bot Filtering
Pretty Links ships with a built-in regular expression that matches around 70 known bots — Googlebot, Bingbot, link checkers, social media unfurlers, and modern AI crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot. Clicks from user agents matching this pattern are silently ignored and never written to your reports.
In addition to the user-agent regex, Pretty Links applies several other cheap signals on the redirect path:
- Empty
Acceptheader honeypot — real browsers always send one; scripts andcurl/wgetoften don’t; - Non-GET methods — link clicks are GET, so HEAD/POST/etc on the redirect URL is treated as a scanner or preview probe;
- Platform mismatch — when the browser sends a
Sec-CH-UA-Platformhint that doesn’t match the OS in its user-agent string.
Le Filter bots from click counts setting is on by default and covers the majority of automated traffic without any configuration on your part.
Blocked Bot User-Agent Patterns
If you notice a specific bot or scraper hitting your links, you can add your own pattern to the Blocked bot user-agent patterns field. Enter user agent fragments one per line — for example:
MyScraper;internal-monitor;pingdom.
Anything matching one of your custom patterns gets filtered along with the built-in list. Patterns are case-insensitive and matched as substrings, so pingdom matches Pingdom.com_bot/3.2.
Blocked IP Addresses
Le Blocked IP addresses list is for IP addresses whose clicks you want to ignore — your office, your home, your VPN, a staging server, anywhere you might click a link without it counting as real traffic.
Enter one IP per line. You can use:
- Single IPs —
203.0.113.42; - Wildcards —
203.0.113.*matches any IP in that block; - CIDR ranges —
203.0.113.0/24matches the same block in CIDR notation; - IPv6 — Both single addresses and CIDR ranges are supported.
Allowed IP Addresses
Le Allowed IP addresses list is the opposite of the Blocked list — it’s for IPs you specifically want to always count, even if they’d otherwise be filtered as bots.
This is useful if a teammate is testing from an IP that happens to share a range with a known bot, or if you want to guarantee your QA traffic is recorded.
The Allowed list overrides the bot filter — an allowed IP is counted even if its user agent looks like a bot. It does pas override the Blocked list, however: an IP that appears on both lists is still blocked. Don’t list the same IP in both.
Cloudflare Bot Management
If your site sits behind Cloudflare and Bot Management is forwarding signals to your origin, Pretty Links picks them up automatically — no setting to toggle. Two headers are honored:
CF-Bot-Score— when present and below 30 (Cloudflare’s threshold for “very likely bot”), the click is filtered;CF-Verified-Bot— when set to a truthy value (Googlebot, Bingbot, and other Cloudflare-verified crawlers), the click is filtered.
This catches a lot of bots that spoof their user agent strings to look like real browsers, which is increasingly common.
You’ll need a Cloudflare plan that exposes Bot Management headers to the origin (not available on the basic plan).
How to Find Your Office IP
To exclude your own clicks from reports, you need to know what IP your office or home network appears as on the public internet.
The fastest way:
- From the network you want to exclude, visit any “what is my IP” website.
- Copy the IP shown.
- Paste it into the Blocked IP addresses field in Tableau de bord > Pretty Links > Options > Rapports.
If your office uses a dynamic IP (most home internet does), you may need to use a wildcard like 203.0.113.* to cover the range your ISP rotates through, or check back periodically and update the IP.
If you have a remote team, gather everyone’s IPs and add them all to the Blocked IP addresses list.
Filtering Takes Effect Immediately
Changes to your bot patterns and IP lists apply to new clicks going forward. Already-recorded clicks aren’t retroactively removed. If you want a clean slate after tightening your filters, you can manually delete unwanted rows from the Historique des clics report.