Recaptcha on WP blog posts

I wouldn’t do that, challenging humans to complete a CAPTCHA to simply view your site is just going to result in them not visiting your site either.

Instead, try https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/blackhole-bad-bots/ or https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/antibots/ to only block bot traffic.

Your actual concern is your assumption that there are many accesses from bots in Analytics. Analytics already has many methods to exclude these from their statistics. As far as I know, GA4 does this fully automatically – if you have the impression that it is incorrect, I would not try to bother your real human visitors with anti-spam methods, but rather question how GA4 counts the hits for you.

Google itself has provided an article on this here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9888366

You must also bear in mind that GA4 could display hits that were not even on your site. You can filter out known IP addresses for this, see: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10104470 – there are also some articles on this on the net. If you use a CookieConsent tool such as CookieBot, they also access it via their own IPs and could influence the statistics.

Overall, I don’t see your question as a WordPress issue.

Hello James and thankyou for your reply. Yeah I certainly get your point re dissuading human visitors with captcha. I have blackhole installed and it has blocked one bot over the past few months. Maybe I’ll give antibots a try to. Thankyou

If Black Hole only blocked one bot, that suggests to me the majority of your traffic is from humans and rule-following bots (like search indexers).

Would you please explain a bit more why you think the vast majority of your traffic is bot traffic?

Hello Threadi, my assumption that it is bots visiting my site is based on the GA stats – in the last 30 days I have had 675 sessions, yet only 25 referrals from six sites, and 98 percent of my visitors are new. Further, four of the top 10 most popular posts are old and obscure posts that I wrote years ago and have not promoted for a long time.

I’ll read the articles you suggest and try to learn more about it.

Thankyou!

That pattern sounds like search engine traffic.

Some of your posts probably rank highly for certain terms, and all of those would be new visitors.

As for the lack of referrers, keep in mind that pretty much all tracker blockers block referrers now.

Hey James,

Ahhhh ok. It just seemed unlikely that a handful of random old posts that are a bit obscure would actually generate traffic to my blog. But that’s interesting about the lack of referrers – if I had seen legit search engines in my referrers list then I would have been more likely to believe they were actual human visitors.

I have just installed antibots plugin so I’ll keep an eye on it’s visit log to see the number of human visitors.

I really appreciate your help mate!