Website bot detection  is the process of analyzing all traffic to a website, mobile app, API, and server in order to identify and block malicious bots and allow access to legitimate visitors and authorized partner bots. It’s important to be able to detect and mitigate bots because they are one of the top threats that can impact an SME’s business financially, especially for e-commerce sites. Bad bots can steal money from gift card accounts, cause website crashes, reduce the reliability of customer service and skew Google Analytics reports and KPIs.

Unmasking the Bots: How Website Bot Detection Helps Safeguard Your Online Business

A few of the key signs to look out for include sudden and unexpected traffic spikes, and an increase in a website’s bounce rate. Traffic spikes and high bounce rates usually indicate a high number of bot visits. Additionally, it’s worth examining a website’s traffic in terms of the source IP address and whether or not it is using a free proxies, data center proxies, or residential proxies. Most bots are linked to their parent program and if there’s any variation in the characteristics of that parent program, it can be used as a trigger for further analysis.

More advanced bots can use techniques to avoid detection. For example, they can make use of proxy farms and residential IP addresses to spoof their identity or bypass CAPTCHA. These types of bots are more difficult to protect against as they can appear very human and are very persistent in executing their attacks. That’s why it’s important for websites to be able to leverage a multilateral approach, which combines static, challenge-based, and behavioral website bot detection methods to detect and mitigate these threats.