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What is Bot Traffic?

Not all internet traffic comes from humans. In fact, a large portion of it comes from bots. “Bot traffic” refers to any of the automated requests made to a website or online service by software programs rather than real, human users.

Some bots serve legitimate purposes. For example, search engines use bots to crawl and index web pages, and this is considered totally normal. Monitoring tools use them to check whether sites are up and running, and businesses use them to aggregate pricing data or track content across the web. All of these non-human activities are generally welcome and expected.

The more problematic kind of non-human traffic involves bots that have been designed to scrape data without permission, stuff login forms with stolen credentials, generate fake ad clicks, or flood a server with requests to knock it offline. This type of traffic can drain a site’s resources, skew its analytics, and create security risks for its owners.

From a network standpoint, bot traffic can look similar to human traffic at first glance, which makes it difficult to filter out efficiently. Sites use a variety of methods to detect and block it, including rate limiting, IP blocking, and CAPTCHA challenges. Bots operating at scale often cycle through many IP addresses to avoid detection, which is part of why IP reputation and blacklists exist as tools for identifying suspicious sources.

If you manage a website or are curious about how your traffic is analyzed, understanding the difference between human and automated requests is an important skill to develop.