Why bot traffic matters
Bots pollute what they touch: analytics counting phantom sessions, ad budgets billed for fake clicks, inventory carted by scalpers during drops, prices scraped by competitors, and logins hammered by credential stuffers. The share of non-human traffic on the open web is substantial enough that ignoring it distorts everything measured.
Bot types stores meet
- Good bots: search crawlers, monitoring, and now AI assistants fetching pages
- Scrapers lifting prices, content, and reviews
- Scalper bots seizing limited drops before humans load the page
- Attack bots: credential stuffing, card testing, form spam
Questions
How do stores tell bots from customers?
Behavioral and technical signals in layers: request patterns, fingerprints, challenge responses, and the paths taken. Modern bot management scores rather than binaries, since sophisticated bots imitate humans and clumsy rules block real ones.
Should all bots be blocked?
No: search and legitimate AI crawlers bring the traffic; the policy question is allowlisting the useful, throttling the greedy, and blocking the hostile. Robots.txt states the invitation; bot management enforces the door.