Bot safe method to measure real person traffic

Question

Is there a reliable way to measure traffic to a site that can track if real people are visiting my site? I have a problem with my site where some parties may be incentivised to fake bot traffic for personal gain (using a third party fake traffic service, for instance). So is there a way to track how many real people are visiting my site that is good at detecting fake traffic?

Answer 1

More information would be good but generally seen:

In earlier Google Analytics versions you could create a data view where you could exclude known bots. From the new GA4 this is already integrated automatically: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9888366?hl=en

If you want to track traffic to a thank you page that is called upon successful form-validation, you could test the form using a honeypot or other spam checks.

Generally for websites there was once a solution that could exclude bots that was called blackhole (htaccess solution). As far as I know it is no longer so easy to use because of the GDPR, at least in Germany.