Replacing search with a visible input<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
In last month’s update<\/a> we shared our plans to replace the ‘Search’ link in the header with a visible search input box. This went live in June and as a result we have seen a large reduction in the number of non-course search terms being entered into the course search box on the homepage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shortly after the latest CMS upgrade went live, we deployed our changes to the Web CMS publish schedule<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n After having this running for a couple of weeks, we’ve been seeing that it only takes around 15 minutes for changes to go live in our hourly publishes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We recently noticed that traffic from automated AI scrapers was representing a large proportion of our recorded traffic in Google Analytics, and had been growing over the last year or so. There has always been the potential for some<\/em> bot traffic to make its way into Google Analytics reports, but we were seeing some unexpected locations such as Singapore – a common origin for bot traffic – becoming our top traffic source.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As an interim solution until Google updates their automated filters, we are now filtering out traffic in our Data Studio dashboards based on screen resolutions known to be used exclusively by bots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the last couple of months we’ve been: getting ready for Clearing; improving our website search; changing the CMS publish schedule; filtering out AI bots and lots more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[70],"class_list":["post-1490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-digital-platforms-and-developments"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","uoy_author":{"name":"Paul Kelly","bio":"Digital Platforms and Developments Manager","image":{"src":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=200&d=mm&r=g","width":200,"height":200,"alt":""}},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1490"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1490\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1493,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1490\/revisions\/1493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/communications\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2026\/07\/image-1024x103.png?resize=1024%2C103&ssl=1\")
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nChanges to CMS publish<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Filtering out AI scrapers from Google Analytics data<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Other things<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n