Estimating web crawler and bot traffic carbon footprint for a website

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Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK

£53,295

June 30, 2023

Sept. 30, 2023

Indigo Tree have developed our innovative software to measure the carbon footprint of a website based on visitor analytics and the data transferred for each page on the site. This information is used by website editors to identify where reducing the pages size will have the largest impact on reducing the overall carbon footprint of the website as less electricity will be required to serve the pages to the visitor's browser.

This project creates a model for the website traffic not tracked by analytics, without having to analyse the server log files, as this would take a lot of energy and these files are not usually available to the website editors. We will then incorporate this model into our software to improve the integrity and accuracy of our calculations.

This is important for organisations because as well as tracking their Scope 3 emissions from their website it will help measure the improvements and reduction over time contributing to their organisation Net Zero targets. There is also a direct commercial benefit to the website owner as a website that uses less data to serve each page will be faster which improves search rankings, visitor experience and visitor conversions.

The website hosting providers and data centres will transfer less data, so the electricity required for each website and hosting server will be reduced, contributing to their Scope 2 reduction targets. This will contribute towards the government target of reducing the UK energy demand by 15% from 2021 levels by 2030\.