What is Hotjar?
Direct Answer: Hotjar is a user analytics and feedback tool operated by Hotjar, now part of Contentsquare.
Hotjar provides user analytics and feedback tools for website owners, including heatmaps, session replay, funnels, surveys, and user tests. It is operated by Hotjar, which is now part of Contentsquare. The platform helps users understand and improve their website or app experiences.
User-Agent Identification
The following user-agent strings identify Hotjar in your live traffic data:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 11_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Hotjar Version/11.0 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1
robots.txt Rules for Hotjar
Respects robots.txt: No
Robots.txt has limited effect on user-initiated bots
Hotjar is triggered by user actions within Hotjar's products. While Hotjar states it respects robots.txt, the bot operates differently from autonomous crawlers — it fetches specific URLs on demand rather than systematically spidering your site. Server-log monitoring is the only reliable way to verify what actually happens.
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Crawl Behavior
Frequency:Not Documented
Request Pattern:Not Documented
Crawl Activity Index
Relative crawl activity for Hotjar over the past 28 days. Higher values indicate increased crawling intensity compared to the period baseline.
View recent activity data (last 7 days)
| Date | Activity Index |
|---|---|
| May 25, 2026 | 62.5 |
| May 26, 2026 | 72.1 |
| May 27, 2026 | 73.0 |
| May 28, 2026 | 71.5 |
| May 29, 2026 | 67.8 |
| May 30, 2026 | 68.1 |
| May 31, 2026 | 62.0 |
Source: Cloudflare Radar
Why track Hotjar traffic?
Distinguish monitoring traffic from real crawler activity. Hotjar checks your site availability at regular intervals. Without proper identification, these requests can inflate your bot traffic metrics and distort crawl analysis.
Validate monitoring coverage. Track which pages Hotjar checks and how frequently, so your monitoring setup matches your infrastructure requirements.
Log Verification
To verify Hotjar traffic in your live traffic data:
- Search access logs for the user-agent strings listed above
- Check if the IP addresses match documented ranges (if provided by Hotjar)
- Verify the crawl pattern matches documented behavior
- Use reverse DNS lookup for additional verification if available
Note: Observed behavior in production environments may differ from official documentation. Live traffic monitoring provides the only reliable verification of actual bot behavior.
Undocumented Information
The following information is not officially documented for Hotjar:
- crawl frequency
- IP verification
- JavaScript rendering
- request pattern
Official Documentation
View Official Hotjar Documentation →
Information sourced from official documentation. Content generated with AI assistance.