Bot traffic policy
Why crawler visits never move your metrics, create contacts, or cost you events.
Crawlers hit your site all day: search engines, AI crawlers, social preview fetchers, SEO tools, uptime monitors, and your own scripts. FounderHQ separates them from people before any number is drawn. You do not configure this.
How a visit is classified
Classification happens on the server, when the event arrives — not in the browser, where anyone could switch it off. It uses user-agent rules covering AI crawlers, search engines, social preview fetchers, SEO tools, monitoring services, plain HTTP clients, and browser automation. The web SDK adds one signal of its own: whether the page is being driven by automation.
What happens to a bot visit
Bot events are recorded, not thrown away. Each one is stored with a bot classification and a synthetic guest identity that is shared by all bots on that key. Two things follow:
- No bot ever becomes a contact. A crawler cannot create people in your audience, cannot enter a segment, and cannot enter a sequence.
- Bot events do not count toward your plan's event limit.
Bot traffic is also excluded from sessions, contact activity, and every human metric in the product. Visitors, conversions, and revenue read the same whether a crawler visited once or a million times.
Why keep them at all
Because "which AI crawlers read my launch post" is a real question, and 2026 is a good year to be able to answer it. The events stay queryable by classification, so AI and search crawler visibility is available without ever touching your product metrics.
The one limit
The bot signals travel on your publishable key, which anyone can read from your page. So bot storage has its own capped pool, sized to your plan's event limit and counted separately from your real events. Once that pool is full, further bot events are refused at ingest and the response says so explicitly. Your human events are never affected by a flood of bot traffic.
What this means for you
- Your first-week numbers are people, not preview fetchers.
- A viral link that draws scrapers does not inflate your bill.
- If a real browser is ever misread as a bot, tell support with the user agent. Classification is server-side, so a fix reaches everyone without an SDK release.