Last Updated on 30/08/2025
Bots have become an essential component of today’s digital landscape. They assist us in ordering groceries, playing music on our Slack channel, and repaying our coworkers for the great smoothies they brought us. Bots also fill the internet, carrying out the purposes for which they were built.
So, what does this mean for website owners?
And, perhaps most significantly, what does this mean for the environment?
Continue reading to learn all you need to know about bot traffic and why it matters!
What is a Bot?
Let us start with the basics: A bot is a software application that runs automated tasks via the Internet. Bots can mimic or even replace the behavior of an actual person. They excel at doing repetitive and tedious jobs. They are also fast and efficient, making them ideal for large-scale tasks.
What is Bot Traffic?
Bot traffic refers to any non-human traffic to a website or application. It is frequently associated with negativity, although it isn’t always bad; it all depends on the bots’ intent.
Some bots are necessary for useful services, such as search engines and digital assistants (e.g., Siri and Alexa). Most firms accept these types of bots on their websites.
Other bots may be malevolent, such as those used for password stuffing, data scraping, and DDoS assaults. Even more innocuous ‘bad’ bots, such as illegal web crawlers, can cause problems by disrupting site statistics and generating click fraud. Some of these bots are also employed in traffic arbitrage schemes, driving artificial traffic to low-value sites to generate ad revenue at the expense of legitimate platforms.
It is estimated to account for more than 40% of all Internet traffic, with malevolent bots comprising a significant portion of that. This is why so many firms are seeking strategies to limit bot activity on their websites.
Good Bot Vs Bad Bot
Bots may be either useful or destructive. Here’s how they vary:
Good Bots
Commonly useful bots include, but are not limited to:
- Site Monitoring Bots
These bots can detect system faults and track the performance of your website. We utilize tools like Site Audit to notify you of concerns such as outages and sluggish response times. Continuous monitoring ensures that your site performs optimally and remains accessible to your visitors.
- Crawlers from SEO Tools
Tool bots, such as the SemrushBot, scan your website to help you make informed decisions, including optimizing meta tags and determining page indexability. These bots are beneficial because they help you adhere to SEO best practices.
- Search Engine Crawlers
Search engines utilize bots, such as Googlebot, to index and rank your website’s pages. Without these bots scanning your site, your pages would not be indexed, and customers would not be able to locate your company in search results.
Bad Bots
You may not notice traffic or evidence of malicious bots daily, but you should remain constantly aware of the possibility of being attacked.
Bad bots, including but not limited to:
- Spam Bots
Bots may also generate and disseminate spam content, including phishing emails, fake social media profiles, and forum postings. Spam may mislead users and compromise internet security by tricking them into disclosing sensitive information.
- Scrapers
Bots may scrape and steal content from your website without your consent. Publishing the knowledge elsewhere is intellectual property theft and copyright violation. If consumers see your material replicated elsewhere on the internet, the credibility of your brand may be jeopardized.
- DDoS Bots
DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) bots attempt to overwhelm your servers and prevent users from accessing your website by flooding them with bogus traffic. These bots can disrupt your site’s availability, resulting in downtime and financial losses if users are unable to access or purchase what they need.
How Does Bot Traffic Affect Websites and Analytics?
It can distort website statistics and produce false data by impacting the following:
- Session Durations
Bots can affect the session length metric, which measures the average time visitors spend on your website. Bots that surf your website rapidly or slowly might change the average session time, making it difficult to determine the genuine quality of the user experience.
- Page Views
It can artificially increase the number of page views, giving the impression that visitors are more engaged with your website than they actually are.
- Conversions
Bots can interfere with your conversion goals, such as form submissions, sales, or downloads, by using phony information and emails.
- Location of Users
Concealing their IP addresses or employing proxies gives the appearance that your site’s users are originating from somewhere else.
It can potentially have a detrimental influence on your website’s performance and user experience.
- Damaging your Reputation and Security
Bots can compromise your website’s reputation and security by stealing or scraping content, pricing information, and sensitive data. An assault (such as DDoS) might lose your income and client confidence. With your site potentially unavailable, your rivals may gain if visitors visit them instead.
- Consuming Server Resources
Bots can waste bandwidth and server resources, especially if they are malevolent or in large volume. This can slow down page load times, increase hosting costs, and potentially cause your website to crash.
How Can Websites Manage Bot Traffic?
The first step in preventing or regulating bot traffic on a website is to add a robots.txt file. This file contains instructions for bots crawling the website, and it may be set to block bots from viewing or interacting with a webpage entirely. However, only good bots will adhere to the restrictions in robots.txt; bad bots will continue to crawl a website.
A variety of technologies can help reduce abusive bot traffic. A rate-limiting solution can detect and prohibit bot traffic originating from a single IP address, but it will still miss a significant amount of malicious bot traffic. In addition to rate limitation, a network engineer can examine a site’s traffic and identify questionable network requests, producing a list of IP addresses to block using a filtering tool. This is a time-consuming operation that only reduces a part of the unwanted bot traffic.
Apart from rate restriction and direct engineer involvement, the simplest and most efficient approach to eliminate harmful bot traffic is via a bot control system. A bot management solution can utilize intelligence and behavioural analysis to detect dangerous bots before they reach a website.
Connect with Marketing Lad today for your tailored solutions!
FAQs
1. What is bot traffic, and how does it differ from organic traffic?
It is defined as automated visits to a website initiated by software programs known as bots or crawlers. Unlike organic traffic, which consists of actual human visitors, this traffic is frequently generated by search engine spiders, web scrapers, or malicious bots. It can bias website statistics and impact performance metrics.
2. How can I identify bot traffic on my website?
To identify this on your website, look for odd patterns in activity, such as a large number of visitors with short session durations or frequent visits to certain sites. Analyze your website logs or utilize analytics solutions that include bot detection capabilities to distinguish between bot visits and legitimate user traffic.
3. What are the common sources of bot traffic?
It is commonly generated by search engine crawlers such as Googlebot and Bingbot, which index web pages for search engines. Other sources include online scrapers employed by rivals or data aggregators, malicious bots that scrape or spam websites, and automated systems for website monitoring or performance testing.
4. What are the potential risks or drawbacks associated with bot traffic?
It can cause skewed website analytics, deceptive performance metrics, increased server strain, which raises hosting costs, and vulnerability to harmful activities such as scraping, spamming, or DDoS assaults. It can also impact website performance and user experience, potentially leading to lower engagement and transactions.
5. How can I prevent or mitigate the impact of bot traffic on my website’s analytics and performance?
To minimize or limit the impact of this, use procedures such as controlling bot access using a robots.txt file, filtering out harmful bots with CAPTCHA or bot detection tools, and frequently monitoring website analytics to identify and prohibit suspicious bot activity. Consider using rate limitation or IP blocking for aggressive bots.
