Everything you'd want to know before you install.
A detailed look at how Traffic Radar — Real-time traffic & AI crawlers for PrestaShop 8 & 9 works, why we built it the way we did, and the thinking behind the features above.
Why a traffic radar in 2026
In two years, bots have become the leading page consumers on many e-commerce stores. On top of search engines and SEO tools came AI crawlers: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot, Bytespider and a couple dozen others that harvest your product pages to train models, feed conversational assistants and populate AI search engines. The problem: your classic analytics blend this automated traffic with your real customers. There is no way to know how many humans actually visit, nor what share of your bandwidth goes to AI scraping.
Separating humans from crawlers, for real
Traffic Radar combines two signals. Server-side tracking, hooked on actionFrontControllerSetMedia, records every page view and classifies the user-agent: this is what captures AI crawlers, which almost never run JavaScript. In parallel, a lightweight client heartbeat keeps real visitors counted as online between page loads. Because bots do not trigger that beat, the Online now counter stays clean and reflects the real number of humans present.
A dashboard that tells your traffic story
The back office offers a dedicated view under Stats: KPIs with variation versus the previous period, humans vs bots visits chart, audience split doughnut by type (AI, search, SEO, social, monitoring), top AI crawlers, hour-by-weekday activity heatmap, top pages, referrers and countries, and a live activity feed scrolling page by page. Everything is filterable by period and by audience, down to the precise bot type.
Taking back control of AI crawlers
Beyond measuring, Traffic Radar helps you act. The new crawlers radar highlights bots whose first visit falls within the analysed period, to spot a new AI player instantly. The robots.txt control center lists 25 known AI crawlers with sensible defaults (block training crawlers, let through agents that answer a user request): you tick, preview the robots.txt block and copy it. Crawlers actually observed on your store are flagged.
Privacy and zero maintenance
No raw IP address is stored: only salted SHA-1 hashes, with optional anonymisation of the last octet before hashing. Data retention is configurable and the purge runs probabilistically as traffic flows, which avoids any cron or scheduled task. An excluded IP list lets you ignore your own browsing and your team's.
Architecture and compatibility
Traffic Radar is written in PSR-4 under the DataFirefly/TrafficRadar namespace with a bundled autoloader, without any Composer dependency. It uses a legacy ModuleAdminController to stay compatible with PrestaShop 8.0 to 9.x, two indexed utf8mb4 tables, and Chart.js bundled locally with no CDN. Multistore and multilingual (FR, EN, ES, DE, IT).
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