Do bots/crawlers increase my pageviews?

I have a phpbb forum. It shows pageviews for each thread. Can those be artificially inflated by bots/crawlers, or are they real?

thanks

 

A pageview is just when somebody views a page.
So that's bots included as far as I know.

 

thanks for your help diether,
can anyone say something more definitive?

 

Yes, I have seen this happen when I had ads enable for members. As soon as I use to post a topic, there used to be two page views instead of one. One was me, the other one most probably was from the adsense bot.