Spot rule breaking crawlers, protect your analytics
Microsoft Clarity now highlights bots that ignore robots.txt, giving site owners clear, actionable visibility. The new Violations view surfaces disallowed requests, and calculates them as a percent of bot traffic. You can filter these requests by bot operator, name, activity type, and URL path. This makes it easy to compare compliant crawlers with rule breakers. It helps spot patterns that may skew analytics or drain server capacity. Enabling the feature requires admin access and a supported CDN, or the latest Clarity plugin for WordPress. Clarity records requests that reached disallowed paths, it does not block them, robots.txt is advisory.
Site owners get an automated, scalable alternative to manual server log parsing, saving time. The Violations view can clarify whether AI crawlers are skewing traffic numbers. Seeing which operators break rules helps prioritize mitigation, and informs CDN or firewall strategies. This free tool integrates AI Visibility insights, so teams can monitor trends over time. The key question is whether visibility will change crawler behavior, or simply improve record keeping. Read our curator summary, then explore the full post for setup steps, supported CDNs, and practical next steps. Start now.
Source: www.searchenginejournal.com
