How we count MTU
Most analytics tools bill by "monthly tracked users," but quietly count every flicker of traffic — a bot crawling your site, a visitor who bounced after one page, the same person twice because they logged in halfway through. SegOps counts MTU differently, and the rule is short enough to hold in your head:
An MTU is a resolvable, engaged, human profile — someone you could actually segment and act on.
The three things that have to be true#
A profile counts toward your bill for the month only if all three hold:
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It's a real person, not a bot. Every event is classified as human, a known bot, an AI agent, or suspicious. Search engines and AI crawlers (Googlebot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, …) are recognized and excluded. They never cost you an MTU — though you can still see them in Discovery Intelligence, because knowing that GPTBot crawled your store is valuable.
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They showed real intent. A visitor who loads one page and leaves isn't a tracked user — they're noise. An anonymous profile only becomes an MTU once it crosses an engagement threshold (a handful of events; the exact number is a setting on your plan, three by default). The moment someone identifies — logs in, gives an email — they count, because now you can act on them.
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They're one person, counted once. This is the subtle one. Someone browses your site anonymously, then signs in. Naively that's two "users": the anonymous one and the logged-in one. SegOps reconciles them into a single profile, so a visitor who converts is one MTU, not two. See How anonymous users are reconciled.
Why it works this way#
You're paying for the ability to understand and reach your customers. A bounced bot gives you nothing to reach; a crawler isn't a customer at all; and double-counting a convert would punish you for exactly the moment you'd want to celebrate. Tying the meter to resolvable, engaged, humans keeps your bill aligned with the value you actually get.
Auditing your number#
Your usage record exposes the computed MTU directly, so the figure is never a black box — you can reconcile it against your own event data any time.
Related: MTU Billing reference · Identity Resolution