Why Gemini visits look like human traffic in your analytics

Ask Gemini about a website and it will go read that site — but unlike GPTBot or ClaudeBot, it doesn't always announce itself. On sites we monitor, a single Gemini query produced two different kinds of visits, and both were counted as human by conventional analytics.

Disguise #1: the bare "Google" user agent

Some Gemini URL fetches arrive with a user agent of exactly:

Google

That's it. One word. It contains no "bot", no "crawler", no version string — so every keyword-based bot filter waves it straight through into your human traffic. Google's own crawler documentation lists tokens like Googlebot and Google-NotebookLM, but the bare Google UA only shows up in the field, in server logs, attached to Google's published fetcher IP ranges.

Disguise #2: the fake Chrome that forgot its lines

The second pattern is sneakier — a full browser costume:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 Chrome/116.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Looks like Chrome on Linux. Two tells give it away. First, every real Chrome, Safari, and Edge user agent contains (KHTML, like Gecko) — this one doesn't. Second, it's pinned to Chrome 116, a version from 2023, while real browsers today report 149+. We watched this UA crawl a dozen pages of a site in under a minute, referrer chains and all, immediately after a Gemini query about that site.

Why this matters beyond curiosity

If Gemini's reads count as humans, your human baseline inflates, your bounce and engagement metrics drift, and — the expensive part — retargeting pixels and conversion events fire for a bot audience. You pay to advertise to software.

How to unmask them

Two rules, both automatable:

1. Anchor-match the bare Google UA (the entire UA, not a substring — plenty of legitimate browsers merely contain the word).
2. Reject browser claims missing (KHTML, like Gecko) — and when such a visit's IP falls inside Google's published user-triggered fetcher ranges, you've identified a Gemini fetch with evidence, not a guess.

VisitorType does both at collection time: the bare-Google UA classifies as an AI assistant fetch, masked-browser UAs are flagged, and IP verification against Google's published ranges upgrades them to confirmed Google fetches. Your human numbers become human again — and your tags can treat Gemini's visits as what they are: a new reader that briefs your next customer.

Curious what's hiding in your "human" traffic? Create a free account — the first Gemini unmasking usually happens within a day.