Title: Do search engine crawlers contribute to page views?
Tags: discussion
Question: First, I thought people actually looked at my questions!  Then I noticed that most of the page view increments happened between the time I go to bed and the time I wake up (EDT here).  Either people in Asia really like my questions or I am sure my questions are being hit by web crawlers.  Is this true?  I guess there is no way for a reputation deficient individual to verify this.

Here is the accepted answer: Crawlers may contribute, but not as much as you might think.
This answer and the one below it have a summary of how the page views are calculated.  Crawlers aren't discussed, but even if not special-cased, wouldn't increase the pageviews strictly with how many times they hit the page.
Views are counted based on IP, excepting IPs that have recently visited and shouldn't be counted again.  After some time, IPs are expired off the list.  New visits reset the counter, so a crawler that hit the page frequently might only ever count as a single view.  One that hit the page at an interval just over the expiration period would increase the number of views by one per interval.  As of that last question, the interval looks to have been ~15 minutes.


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