I don't disagree that it's difficult for those running servers who want to filter this sort of thing out, given the state of the current tools. The fact remains

I don't disagree that it's difficult for those running servers who want to filter this sort of thing out, given the state of the current tools. The fact remains that it's the right way to do this sort of thing, however. As for me, I happily do not run any public websites other than my personal ones, and in that context I don't much care about analytics, so I'm afraid that I can't show you a good way to do this in Apache. For what it's worth, thought, I think the header for prefetch is "X-Purpose: prefetch" in Safari and Chrome, and "X-Moz: prefetch" (yes, really) for Firefox.