The digital landscape has seen a significant increase in automated traffic — including a rise in what are called bots (or "robots") and spiders both of which "crawl" the web visiting all web pages looking for content for their own purposes. The problem is that these automated visitors can artificially inflate the visit counts reported on any website, and in our case the sermon play counts reported on SermonAudio. This issue has been widely reported for many years and should be a major concern for every online platform seeking to ensure accurate website statistics.

What are we doing about it?

First, unlike advertising-driven websites, we have no financial motivation to attract indiscriminate traffic. We have therefore recently implemented an important new piece of technology as part of our Vault infrastructure to help mitigate this hidden bot activity. We call it Vault Shield, and every broadcaster on SermonAudio is automatically protected against inaccurate sermon play counts from automated traffic.

Check it out in the dashboard:
www.sermonaudio.com/dashboard/analytics/sermons

It's all about transparency, integrity, and accuracy.

While some popular websites may not publicly report bot traffic in their website visitor counts, we're committed to transparency. Web analytics is not an exact science, but as part of our ongoing efforts to improve the accuracy of our reporting, we're implementing the latest tools available to separate out known bot traffic from your overall sermon play counts. As a result, the sermon downloads that are reported will be presented with the utmost integrity and accuracy.

Automated visitors may end up being real visitors.

It is important to note that although we are making our best effort to exclude automated traffic from sermon play counts, the actual sermon media will still be freely accessible — even to automated visitors. We do not block content, ever. We realize that automated visitors (such as search engines, crawlers, and podcast directories) may eventually distribute your sermons into the hands of real visitors on other platforms. However, they will be categorized separately and clearly indicated as such.

Our mission is to protect and propagate sound preaching.

When you broadcast your sermons on SermonAudio, rest assured that our entire team from the leadership to every developer is dedicated to reaching the world with great preaching. This is why we are building The Vault, and this is why we want to ensure that even the sermon play counts that are reported month by month will accurately reflect that commitment.

If you have any questions or concerns about these changes, please don't hesitate to reach out to us. We're always here to help in any way we can.