incrediBILL - 9:24 pm on Aug 6, 2012 (gmt 0)

ike pre-rendering traffic

Yes, but Firefox and some other browsers also do prefetch which can be disabled in the browser and/or blocked at the server which many of us do to avoid wasting the bandwidth and server resources. Not only that, but I believe it identifies such prerender requests in the HTTP header so it could be correctly identified and filtered, but the traffic is still real when you get down the actual pages requested.

The proper metric would obviously be unique browsers per IP but then again, unless you're tracking them with a cookie, you can't tell if it's one browser or several on services with modem pools like AOL where the browser IP changes every few minutes.

There's other things that will also muck up the stats, but I think it's close enough for government work.