What is Google Analytics traffic from “Mozilla Compatible Agent”

Question

At work we recently made some changes to our URL structure (permanent redirects to new urls), redirecting various routing rules to a consistent format/page. This effectivel

Answer 1

Upon inspecting further, when drilling into the "network" and location of the visitors from "Mozilla Compatible Agent" in Google Analytics, the majority of the traffic was coming from two locations (Hialeah, Florida and San Fransisco, California), both stemming from Microsoft's network. This traffic was present all along, but in under 1% of our overall traffic until the recent change.

I can only posit that it has something to do with Bing (likely Bing's Preview functionality) that is actually executing each page in browser instances and capturing the result.

I think the surprising thing is that Google isn't already filtering the results, but being that most crawlers/spiders don't execute JavaScript, the functionality may not be present.

The caveat here is to take this into account in terms of tracking your stats. We now have a filter against traffic coming from "microsoft" as the network source so that in the future this doesn't affect our stats so strongly.