Is there any way to clean up access logs for statistics purposes?

Hi everyone,

I’m currently selfhosting a website that has quite an audience (~2 000 unique visitors/day) and I’m trying to measure that audience more precisely.

I just want to have a simple report of the most viewed pages, the most popular browser, etc… very very basic stuff.

I want to avoid client-side solution as they can and will very easily be blocked and render my effort completely useless. I had a Matomo until 2023 that registered less than half the visits when compared to my access logs.

I tried to look into GoAccess but it gathers a lot (and I mean A LOOOOOT) of chinese/indian/russian bots which are pretty difficult to filter out (if you have a method, please share it, I’m very curious!).

Is there any way you’re aware of to have decent stats without invading the privacy of my visitors or counting bots?