Bot Traffic

Bot traffic is the share of requests to a site generated by automated programs such as search crawlers, uptime monitors and scraping scripts rather than by a person.

Bots come in two kinds: those that identify themselves and can be matched against known user-agent lists, and those that imitate a real browser and are only exposed by behaviour, such as inhuman speed, no pointer movement, or an identical path repeated exactly. No detection method is complete, so any bot figure is an estimate. The dangerous reading is treating a sudden traffic jump with near-zero time on page as audience growth. The same issue explains the gap between server logs and analytics tools: JavaScript-based measurement never sees simple bots that do not run scripts, while the server log records every one of them.