Did you know most online traffic now comes from bots? These programs, both good and bad, shape online visibility, customer experiences, and even security. Your establishment’s future in this digital era may depend on how you manage them.
The Internet’s Hidden Workforce
The 2025 Imperva Bad Bot Report found that 51% of all web traffic came from bots for the first time in a decade — that’s less than half of internet activity being human! The shift to artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) is driving this change.
Bots are software or automated programs that perform tasks online. They come in various forms, including:
- Search engine crawlers that index content for search engines
- Social media bots for fine-tuned post-scheduling and automated customer support
- Scrapers that extract data
- Monitoring bots that track website performance or downtime
- Chatbot platform services for conversational AI
Unfortunately, these helpful tools only make up a portion of bots online. The latest research suggests that many are malicious.
The Hidden Menace of Online Automation
Like any modern technology, people can use bots for harmful purposes, from stealing data to spreading spam and artificially inflating numbers. The most affected industries are travel, where 41% of traffic comes from bots, and retail, where that number jumps to 59%.
In 2024, the travel sector also suffered from the most attacks. It received 27% of all malicious bot attacks globally, which rose from 21% the year prior.
Combatting the Rising Threat of Bad Bots
Imperva warns that 37% of all internet traffic comes from malicious bots deployed by cybercriminals. It’s the sixth consecutive year that harmful bot traffic has increased.
Why wait for your establishment to become a victim? Consider these proactive steps:
Learn Effective Password Habits
Create different passwords for each account to stop credential-stuffing bots and make them strong and unique to avoid brute-force attacks. Enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) wherever possible, too.
Strengthen Your Website’s Defenses
Your competition can use bots to slow down your page loading times, steal your content, or even exploit vulnerabilities. Many protective strategies exist at your disposal:
- Honey trapping: You let the bot operate in your platform but feed it with fake data to waste resources and fool its operators.
- Entry testing: Secure your website traffic with CAPTCHA tests or puzzle challenges. They’re easy for humans to solve but require complex processing for bots.
- Throttling: You allow bot access but limit its bandwidth allocation to slow its operation. Threat operators will likely move on when progress is too slow.
Invest in a Bot Detection System
It never hurts to get dedicated software that detects and blocks bots. Many tools from reputable providers can analyze traffic patterns, quickly identify suspicious activity, and give real-time alerts.
The Path to Effective Bot Management
Does your business use a web scraping bot for data collection or other automated tools? Don’t forget that threat actors can target your systems, too. Stay ahead with strong prevention measures against bots.
