With bot traffic on the increase, many publishers are turning to bot traffic management tools to help minimise the risk of malicious or fraudulent non-human traffic on their sites. While this in itself is a good thing to help mitigate the issue of Invalid Traffic (IVT) - there is a major pitfall when using these products. .

Overly aggressive security settings in platforms such as Cloudflare contribute to this issue and creating firewall exceptions such as User Agent contains Googlebot will help avoid this problem. It's advised to always keep an eye on your traffic data to monitor any sudden drops and to ensure that publishers are working with their providers to confirm the setup is correct to avoid this issue.