What is Bot Traffic and How to Filter it Out

As an owner of a website or an app, one of the most frustrating things is when you evaluate your web traffic, only to find out a good portion of it could be attributed to bots. 

For those unaware, bot traffic refers to automated requests made to websites, servers, or apps by programs – or bots – rather than actual human users. What’s even worse is that these bots can be both harmless and harmful. For harmless bots, the worst thing they can do is blur your website or app reports, making it more difficult to pinpoint your real traffic and get more accurate insights on your potential audience. When it comes to harmful bots, however, they can work to dismantle your business completely. 

With bots becoming more frequent in 2024, it’s become more important than ever to understand what bot traffic is, how to carry out bot detection and how to filter it out, so below are a few tips and tricks to protect your digital space.

What is Bot Traffic?

For the purpose of this article, we’re going to focus on malicious bots and what they could mean for your business. Malicious bots are automated programs that are specifically designed to perform harmful or malicious activities across websites, applications and networks – exploiting vulnerabilities, extracting sensitive data, disrupting services, and even engaging in fraudulent activities. These bots can also operate at scale, creating significant danger to your business, whether that be the danger of a data breach or financial loss. 

One of the most common malicious bots is known as a ‘scraper’. These bots extract your SEO content, pricing, product listings, and aggregate the data for competitors to undercut your business – effectively causing financial loss through unfair competitive practices. Another common bot is the ‘credential stuffing bot’, which uses stolen username and password combinations to gain unauthorised access to user accounts. By doing this, hackers look to take over an account, carry out identity theft and make fraudulent purchases.

DDoS bots are becoming increasingly common in 2024, too. These are bots designed to overwhelm servers with massive amounts of traffic, causing them to crash or become unavailable. This ultimately leads to loss of service, loss of revenue, and a loss of reputations as your users perceive your platform to be unreliable. ‘Click fraud bots’ are also similar, only they work to overwhelm online ads with clicks and exhaust a company’s ad budget, making the spend on ads useless. Another important bot to know about is the ‘spam bot’, which floods websites with irrelevant or harmful content, decreasing the user experience, spreading malware, or even making phishing attempts through malicious links.

Apart from the bots discussed above, other bots to be aware of include:

• Inventory Hoarding Bots

Bots that automatically purchase or reserve limited-availability products for resale at a higher price.

• Web Vulnerability Scanners

Bots that search for vulnerabilities in websites, applications, or APIs, such as outdated software or unpatched security flaws – vulnerabilities that hackers can then exploit.

• Ad Fraud Bots

Bots that simulate legitimate user engagement with ads to inflate viewership and deceive advertisers, ultimately wasting your company’s ad budget by generating false metrics.

How to Filter Out Bots

Each of these bots can be damaging for your digital space – and business as a whole – so it’s important to understand how to detect them and filter them out. Spotting bot traffic can be done most effectively by analysing the bounce rate, abnormal session durations, and researching spikes in traffic from unknown locations. Once you’ve spotted an influx in bots, you can work at counteracting them. 

One of the most effective ways to do this – if your chosen web server allows for it – is through implementing CAPTCHA. For those unaware, CAPTCHA – which stands for ‘Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart’ – ensures that actions like form submissions and logins are performed entirely by humans. It does this through presenting challenges that would be easy for humans to solve, but difficult for bots. While this can be effective for some bots, however, it’s not always effective at blocking advanced bots. 

For this, it might be worth initialising a rate limit. This is a technique that limits the number of requests a specific IP address can make in a given time period – if a bot is sending too many requests in an attempt to overload the server, this can automatically block or slow down their traffic. Bot detection tools can also be highly effective. 

Tools like WAFs – Web Application Firewalls – and management platforms use the latest technology to detect bots and recognise their signatures. In our opinion, this is probably the best tactic to filter out bots in 2024. As mentioned before, the problem is only getting worse, and with bots capable of bringing down a website – and potentially an entire business – it’s more important than ever to build up your defences and ensure your business is protected.