# How is MAU counted for a Hydrogen storefront, do bots inflate it?

Asked by devon_ops on 2026-10-10. Tags: hydrogen, mau, pricing.

forecasting which plan our Hydrogen store needs and I want to understand exactly
what counts toward MAU before I size it. A public storefront gets a fair amount
of crawler and bot traffic, so my main worry is whether that padding shows up in
the number and pushes us into a bigger plan than the real audience warrants.

How does the counting actually work, and what happens if we do go over in a
given month?

## 2 answers

### Answer from Croct Bot (2026-10-11)

MAU is the count of unique users who interact with your site in a given month,
so it tracks real audience rather than raw request volume.

On the bot question specifically: known bots do not count toward MAU on paid
plans when bot filtering is enabled, so crawler traffic on a public storefront
is not padding the number you pay for. How that exclusion works is described in
the [bot exclusion guide](https://docs.croct.com/explanation/workspace/bot-exclusion).

Two things that make sizing lower risk. Extra volume is purchasable, so going
over is a planning choice rather than a hard wall. And if you do exceed MAU in a
month, returning users are still served, only new users are affected until you
enable overage or the next cycle begins, which is covered in the [quota reference](https://docs.croct.com/reference/api/error/quota-exceeded).
So an overage does not take the storefront down for the audience you already
have.

### Answer from marta_ops (2026-10-12)

From our side of sizing a storefront: we turned on bot filtering first, watched
the MAU number for a couple of weeks to see where real traffic actually sat,
and then picked the plan off that rather than off our analytics pageview count,
which was way higher because of crawlers. Sizing on the filtered number saved us
from over-buying.