A Guide to Bot Traffic: The Good and The Bad

Bots have a bad rep. From all the malicious users, it makes it that much harder for good bots to scrape websites without getting blocked. After all, nearly a quarter of website traffic consists of bad bots according to Imperva’s 2020 Bad Bot Report and it’s only increasing year after year.

What is bot traffic?

Bot traffic is defined as any non-human traffic on a website. Software applications run these automated and repetitive tasks at speeds faster than a real person could.

Good bots perform helpful tasks to the user like:

• Website monitoring bots keep track of your site’s performance and any possible issues.
• Search engine bots crawl every website online and then index the content onto relevant web pages. It’s used by major search engines like Google and Bing.
• Chatbots mimic human conversations with pre-programmed responses to users, often for customer service.

Bad bots love to wreak havoc such as:

• Spam bots create fake accounts or post negative comments. They can also scrape emails to send those unsolicited messages no one likes.
• Ad fraud bots automatically click on ads to generate fake impressions and pageviews. This then costs the advertiser way more without any real sales.
• DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack bots disrupt normal traffic to overwhelm and crash your website. They also leave bandwidth available to steal sensitive information.

Evolution of bots

Throughout the years, bots have developed to become more difficult to detect. Here’s how they’ve grown into their four generations:

• First-generation bots are simple crawlers built with basic scripting tools. They often perform automated tasks such as web scraping or spam. Since they can’t store cookies, they are the easiest to detect.
• Second-generation bots are web crawlers that operate through website development and their headless browsers. These can be detected from their JavaScript variables.
• Third-generation bots appear as browsers but are hijacked by malware. They can simulate human-like mouse movements and keystrokes but are not as random as a real user.
• Fourth-generation bots have the most advanced human-like interaction with random and non-linear mouse movements. These are the hardest to detect and can only really be identified with AI and machine learning technology.

How to detect bots

Although it’s becoming more difficult to detect the most advanced bots, websites have implemented ways to sift through the good and bad.

• Browser fingerprinting is a tracking technique to identify users online. It gathers a device’s information such as their operating system, language, timezone, and plugins.
• Behavior detection looks at users’ movement on the mouse and their time spent on each page. A bot’s movements are usually linear and patterned with rhythmed clicks. If they view your site way too frequently with a high bounce rate, that’s most likely a bot.
• Browser consistency checks if there are features that should or shouldn’t be there from a browser.
• CAPTCHA is a challenge-response test that’s easy for real users to answer but not bots. They’re usually asked to identify objects or to type in a code.
• IP addresses can reveal bot activity if a user finds unusual web traffic. Bad bots often use datacenter proxies which causes them to be frequently blocked. Proxyverse ensures you’re not getting interrupted from any blocks. You can crawl freely without worry with our pool of residential proxies.

Written by,

Joshika Andersson
Proxyverse.io