When tech-savvy users are shopping online, paying their utility bills, or Googling queries to get answers, what they often underestimate is that there are others accessing the same website they are on. The difference lies in the fact that while some would be human, others are not.
According to a report by Imperva- ‘2024 Bad Bot Report’, automated traffic exceeded human activity online, accounting for 51% of all web traffic past year. In comparison to 2023, the malicious bots made up fr 32% of internet traffic, which increased by 37% in 2025.
With the rapid implementation of Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models, bot creation has become easier and scalable. AI tools have eased the barrier of entry for threat actors, allowing them to develop and implement malicious bots quick than ever before.
In turn, automated traffic volumes increase, and secure teams are under pressure to adapt and secure their environments since AI bots are gaining the upper hand. Websites are facing issues in maintaining their sites. In this guide, we will delve into the journey of how to stop AI bot traffic and protect the website of your organization from threat actors.
What is AI Bot Traffic?
Let’s begin by understanding what Bot traffic is. Bot traffic is any non-human traffic to a website or an application. The term is often associated with a negative connotation. However, it is not necessarily good or bad in the practical realm, but it is based on the purpose of the bots and the preferences of the website operator. Some bots are important for useful services like search engines and voice assistants like Siri and Alexa. The majority of the firms adopt these types of bots on their sites.
However, the bots that could be malicious include those made for credential stuffing, data scraping, and executing DDoS attacks. Even other, more dangerous bad bots are unauthorized web crawlers that can be a complex aspect since they disrupt site analytics and generate click fraud. This is why organizations are increasingly looking for ways to mitigate the bot traffic issue on their sites.
How to Identify Bot Traffic?
Web engineers can find network requests to their sites and identify possible bot traffic. An integrated web analytics tool like Google Analytics can also help in detecting bot traffic. These analytics anomalies are the symptoms of bot traffic.
Abnormally high pageviews: When a site sees a sudden, unforeseeable, and unexpected spike in pageviews, there are likely bots affecting your traffic.
Abnormally high bounce rate: The bounce rate is the percentage of people who come to a single page on the website and then leave the site without taking any action. An unexpected increase in the bounce rate could be due to the bots being directed to a single page.
Sudden high or low session duration: Session duration or the amount of time users remain on the site must be relatively steady. An unexplained spike in session duration could suggest the bots are browsing the site at an unusual slow rate. On the other hand, an unexpected decline in session duration could be due to the bots navigating the site more quickly than humans.
Junk conversions: A spike in phony-looking conversions, like account creations using gibberish email addresses or contact forms submitted with fabricated names and phone numbers as a result of form-filling bots or spam bots.
Increase in traffic from an unexpected location: A sudden increase in users from a specific location, particularly in areas with low site awareness, can be a symptom of bot traffic.
How does Bot Traffic Impact Analytics?
As discussed above, unauthorized bot traffic can affect analytics metrics like page views, bounce rate, session duration, geolocation, and conversions. These deviations in metrics cause major frustration for the site owner. It is very difficult to measure the performance of a website that is being flooded with bot activity. The strategies to enhance the site, like A/B testing and conversion rate optimization, are also ruined by the statistical turbulence caused by bots.
How to Filter Bot Traffic From Google Analytics?
Google Analytics provides an option to exclude all clicks from bots and spiders. When the source of the bot traffic can be detected, users can offer a particular list of IPs to be overlooked by Google Analytics.
Although these measures will prevent bots from disruptive analytics, they would not stop AI bot traffic. Moreover, most malicious bots have a goal apart from disrupting traffic analytics, and these measures fail to overcome harmful bot activity outside of preserving analytics data.
How Does a Bot Affect Businesses?
Some sites are financially impacted by malicious bot traffic, even if their performance remains unaffected. The websites that depend on advertising and sites that sell merchandise with restricted inventory are mainly prone to traffic. For the sites that showcase ads, bots that land on the site and click on different sections of the page can trigger fraud clicks, which is also known as click fraud. Although this may result in an increase in ad revenue initially, online advertising networks are effective at finding bot clicks. If they suspect a site of committing click fraud, they take immediate action, mainly in the form of banning the site and penalizing the owners of the network. This is why site owners who host ads should be aware of bot click fraud.
Websites with limited inventory can be the target for the hoarding bots. The bots visit the e-commerce sites and add millions of merchandise items into their shopping carts which making that merchandise out of stock for purchase by the legitimate shoppers. In some scenarios, this can trigger unnecessary restocking of inventory from a supplier or manufacturer. The hoarding bots never purchase but disrupt the availability of stock.
How to Stop AI Bot Traffic?
Firstly, it is important to declare their website administrator’s preferences in the robots.txt file to stop or manage bot traffic to a website. Robots.txt files deliver instructions for bots crawling the page, and they can be configured to command bots they should not to crawl or interact with some webpages. However, it is also noteworthy that some bots comply with the rules in robots.txt files and do not stop bots from crawling websites. Cloudflare provides an advanced managed robots.txt service to assist website administrators in giving their preferences to crawlers.
To stop bot traffic, website owners should use services like AI Audit, which facilitates website operators to either permit or block AI crawlers.
Several tools are there to overcome abusive bot traffic. A rate-limiting solution could be used to detect and prevent high-volume, abusive bot traffic coming from a single IP address.
Network engineers can review traffic, manually detecting suspicious traffic requests emerging from a range of IP addresses and those requests from those IP addresses.
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