Charts of the week: Bot and human web traffic
A few years ago I wrote a post about spam traffic and how it can affect your tracking data. With technology advancement and development of generative AI, the share of bot traffic has not decreased and continues to affect your data.
Global share of human and bot web traffic 2013-20231
According to the 2024 Imperva Bad Bot Report report, most of the global website traffic in 2023 was still generated by humans. However, bot traffic is constantly growing, and fraudulent traffic through bad bot actors accounted for 32% of global web traffic in 2023 (an increase of 1.8 percentage points from the year before).
What is the difference between good and bad bots?
Good bots allow online businesses and products to be found by prospective customers. Search engine crawlers like GoogleBot and Bingbot are examples of good bots. These engines, through their indexing, help people matching their queries with the most relevant sets of websites.
On the other hand, bad bots can perform various malicious activities, such as “web scraping, competitive data mining, personal and financial data harvesting, brute-force login, digital ad fraud, spam, transaction fraud, and more”. Bad bots interact with applications similarly to a legitimate user, hence detecting and preventing them becomes harder. This in turn enables high-speed abuse, misuse, and attacks on websites, mobile apps, and APIs.
Source: Bad Bot Report 2024 by Imperva
Sophistication of Bad Bots is on the rise
The complexity of malicious bot activity has substantially increased in the recent years. Advanced bad bots have doubled in prevalence since 2021, indicating that cyber threats are becoming more sophisticated. Simultaneously, simple bad bots saw a 6% increase compared to the previous year, suggesting a shift in the landscape of automated threats.
Good and bad bots across industries
The impact of bot traffic varies across different sectors. Bad bots accounted for over 57.2% of the web traffic within gaming segment. Meanwhile, almost half of the online traffic for telecom and ISPs was moved by malicious applications.
Areas like entertainment, food and groceries, and financial services experienced notable levels of good bot traffic, demonstrating the diverse applications of benign automated systems across different sectors.
