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How do I tell a bot wall apart from a slow site?

Look at what came back rather than how long it took. A wall returns a challenge document or a block status quickly and consistently, from any address you test, while a slow site returns your own markup eventually.

Why it happens

Bot management assigns a score to the request before your theme is involved. An agent driving a headless browser from a data centre address looks, on every one of those signals, like the scraping traffic the product was bought to stop. The challenge that follows expects a human interaction the agent cannot perform.

The loss is invisible in analytics, and that is the property that makes this stall dangerous. A request that is challenged before the page loads produces no session, no pageview and no add to cart, so it never appears in your conversion rate. It appears as an absence.

Run a free scan and find out which of these your store actually hits.