Bot traffic – what is it, and how can you stop it?

What is bot traffic?

Bot traffic is created artificially by bots visiting your website, just as human traffic is made of human visitors. Importantly, these two types of traffic are not on par with each other, especially in the eyes of advertisers. In fact, sometimes leveraging bot traffic to your advantage can lead to severe consequences, such as being banned from advertising networks once such behavior is detected. That’s why it’s best to concentrate on different types of website traffic, especially the organic one.

What’s worth noting is that there is a vast variety of bots that can potentially end up on your site. Some of them serve neutral or positive purposes, for instance, SEO crawlers that automatically discover, read, and index websites. However, some of them are designed to perform actions that might prove unfavorable or even harmful for your website. Take a glance at their most popular types in the next paragraph!

Bot detection

You would certainly not want harmful bots to crawl your website, since it may lead to awful outcomes. Luckily, you can spot their presence within your digital content. These are four ways in which any publisher can realize that their site is being overly visited by malicious bots:

• Form-filling kind of bot spam – if your e-mail inbox is overloaded with weird-looking or empty messages, it might indicate that some bots are creating accounts on your website using gibberish e-mail addresses or filling contact forms with fake names and phone numbers;
• Unexpected increase in your website traffic – it’s always suspicious and might indicate some bot-related mischief (assuming the boost is not explainable, like right after you implement some SEO tactics or run a campaign);
• Sudden increases in bounce rate – it can be either overly long or very short single-page visits. Either way, it may be a clear sign that there are bots hanging around your content;
• Your website load time suddenly slows down – it may be due to various reasons, including technical issues. But it might as well be caused by increased bot traffic or a bot-conducted DDoS attack.

How to identify bot traffic in Google Analytics

Unfortunately, there’s no “bot traffic” section in GA4; therefore, it’s not possible to clearly identify and track bot traffic. This kind of data is automatically removed from nearly any data analysis. The bot-related data is identified based on research conducted by Google and the “International Spiders and Bots List” prepared by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

However, it’s still possible to detect some suspicious events using Google Analytics that Google didn’t exclude, that you can notice yourself. As stated in the paragraph above, any drastic and unexpected increase in traffic or strange, repetitive, and unusual for your content geolocations (like from a specific town in Alaska while your main audience is from a distant part of the world) should spark your interest! But what can you do about it?

How to stop bot traffic?

A practical method for reducing bot visits’ negative impact is installing a free-of-charge Google reCAPTCHA. Currently, there are three options: reCAPTCHA Enterprise, reCAPTCHA v3, and reCAPTCHA v2 – all available for publishers without a charge for under 1 million assessments in a month.

It is worth being aware of the threat posed by bots. In addition to producing high-quality content and taking care of SEO and UX on your website, you should also remember about the overall health of your website. Also – it’s worth noting that the most valuable traffic for advertisers is organic one, and there are great ways to increase your website traffic worth considering. This way, both parties are satisfied – publishers are sure that their content is appreciated by users and that SEO activities allow content to be found on the Internet, and advertisers are rest assured that their ads are seen by real users. Win-win (no artificials needed)!