Bot Management in the AI Era

AI is a hot topic, with tech companies and their customers alike focusing on how they can use bots and automated agents to improve workflows and business outcomes.

As with everything in life, site owners must learn how to take the good with the bad, as both wanted and unwanted bots can affect how your site performs.

In the following sections, we’ll cover what bots are, the current state of bot traffic, the business impacts of poor bot management, and how WP Engine helps you manage the rising tide of bot traffic web-wide. Let’s dive in!

What are bots?

At their core, bots are automated programs designed to carry out specific tasks online. They’ve been part of the internet since its early days, quietly powering everything from search engines to site monitoring. While some bots are incredibly useful, others can cause serious headaches for site owners, depending on how they’re used and what they’re trying to do.

Some of the very first bots that influenced the evolution of the web were search engine crawlers, which began appearing in the early 1990s. These bots helped index the internet by scanning websites and cataloging their content so it could be surfaced in search results.

Since then, bots have evolved dramatically. Today, they power everything from customer service chat agents to price comparison tools, data scrapers, social media schedulers, and malicious actors attempting to exploit vulnerabilities or skew analytics. 

Understanding which bots interact with your site—and how—is a critical part of managing web performance in the AI era.

The current state of bot traffic

In 2024, bots officially overtook the digital landscape, accounting for 51% of total traffic online according to a report by Imperva. The report attributes this tidal wave of traffic to the rise and rapid adoption of AI tools and Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT by OpenAI or Gemini by Google.

This rapid influx of bot traffic across the web can lead to poor performance and higher site operation costs for businesses of all sizes. 

The legal framework surrounding bot traffic, specifically regarding data scraping, is also in flux. Court rulings are setting new precedents for how bots conduct data collection and other tasks. In the UK, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is looking into changing recommendations for the legitimate use of bot scraping tactics. At the same time, in the U.S., the BOTS Act was created to stop individuals and organizations attempting to automate ticket purchases en masse using bots.

As technology continues to evolve, so too will the legal, regulatory, and ethical landscapes around bots and bot traffic. The goal for businesses in the current landscape is to identify which bots are helpful for your business and which are not. 

Types of bots

Not all bots are bad. Some of them, like search engine crawlers and chatbots, can help sites rank and perform better, while others, like spambots or scraper bots, can flood your sites with malicious content or steal your company’s intellectual property.

The in-between bots, sometimes called grey bots, can be good or bad, depending on your business needs and goals. For example, the SEMrushBot is a crawler that collects site data for SEO purposes. While some customers specifically want this bot for site indexing, others see it as spam traffic and prefer to prevent it from crawling their content.

For grey bots like these, there are mitigation strategies that site owners can use to block the bot entirely, as well as other strategies that can ensure it isn’t blocked outright while ensuring it won’t negatively impact performance. Neither option is wrong; the choice simply depends on the site owner’s goals.

To understand if a bot is good (a bot you want), bad (a bot you don’t want), or somewhere in between, we can categorize them into three buckets:

• Good bots serve helpful and often essential purposes for site owners. These include search engine crawlers like Googlebot that index your content for visibility, uptime monitors that check site availability, accessibility tools that support users with disabilities, and partner integrations that enable external services like Slack link previews or analytics tracking. Their intent is clearly beneficial, and they’re typically allowed or explicitly whitelisted.
• Bad bots act with malicious intent and pose a direct threat to security, performance, and revenue. These include bots used for credential stuffing, carding, scraping proprietary content for profit or duplication, and launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Their goal is to exploit or disrupt systems, often at scale, and they’re usually blocked or aggressively mitigated.
• Grey bots fall into a middle ground where intent is ambiguous or context-dependent. Examples include SEO auditors, competitive price trackers, content aggregators, and bots crawling for AI model training. These bots can either provide some value or create risks depending on who’s operating them and why. While not overtly malicious, they often consume resources, impact competitive advantage, or raise ethical and legal concerns.

All of these bots—good, bad, or grey—can have an effect on the performance of your site and the satisfaction of your human visitors, so monitoring their presence across your site is key to prioritizing your online success.

How bots and AI agents are being used 

Single-purpose bots—like the search engine crawlers and product scrapers—are still common, but the landscape is rapidly evolving.

AI agents represent the next generation of automation. Instead of completing a single task, agents can plan, gather information from multiple sources, and act across systems on behalf of users. This shift is already impacting how websites are built, nudging site owners to consider not just their human visitors, but also the experiences of AI agents on their web properties. This is ushering in an era of dual optimization, where content is shaped differently depending on whether it’s meant for a person or a machine.

“I would imagine we’ll see some of that in the beginning and then the systems will actually just catch up and the industry will kind of settle on a norm,” said WP Engine VP of Product Christine McKee. “What that norm is, I don’t know yet.”

One sign of this change is the emergence of llms.txt, modeled after robots.txt. These files give website owners a way to signal how they want LLMs to interact with their content, offering both guidance and restrictions to AI crawlers consuming content on a site.

As the New York Times puts it: “People use software by touching buttons. A.I. agents use apps and websites by accessing their APIs.” AI Agents can already generate code to interact with any public-facing API, making them powerful and potentially risky tools.

Although this emerging technology is still in its early stages, researchers are quickly advancing the reasoning and learning abilities of AI agents and examining their broader implications through economic and legal lenses. However, key concerns around security, control, and trust remain unresolved.

Identifying bot traffic vs human traffic

The question for site owners is quickly shifting from “how do I block bots from accessing my site?” to “how do I identify bot traffic versus human traffic so I can prioritize great experiences for real people?”

Good news: while some bots are getting better at disguising themselves, there are some tell-tale signs to know when you’re dealing with automated versus human traffic.

By analyzing traffic to your website, you might notice record-high traffic on unusual pages, unusually short or exceptionally long web sessions, excessive login attempts or password reset requests, surges in failed transaction attempts, or other strange behavior.

A managed hosting provider can be instrumental in identifying malicious bot traffic and helping implement a mitigation strategy for specific bots affecting traffic to your site.

Business impacts of bot management

Poor bot management across your site can lead to a number of negative impacts across your business and budget, while monitoring and optimizing for acceptable bots can lead to greater visibility in emerging LLM tools used by your audience.

Let’s take a quick look at some of the negative and positive impacts of a business’s bot management strategy.

Negative impacts of poor bot management

Poor bot management can significantly degrade site performance, especially during traffic spikes. Bots can overwhelm servers by generating a high volume of requests that compete with legitimate users for resources, leading to slower page load times, timeouts, or even outages, particularly on dynamic or resource-intensive pages. The result is a diminished user experience that may drive away visitors and hurt customer satisfaction. 

Inaccurate analytics are another major consequence of unmanaged bot traffic. Bots can inflate metrics such as page views, bounce rates, and conversion funnels, making it difficult for teams to understand real user behavior or measure the effectiveness of marketing and product decisions. This extra noise in the data can lead to misguided strategies and wasted investment in campaigns or features that seem to be performing well, but are actually being misrepresented by non-human traffic.

Security and cost implications are also serious concerns. Malicious bots are commonly used for credential stuffing, content scraping, or probing for vulnerabilities, putting customer data and intellectual property at risk. 

Even when infrastructure costs are not tied to bandwidth overages, bot traffic can increase CPU usage, database load, and edge service consumption, which may lead to the need for more powerful infrastructure or add-on services. Without proactive bot management, businesses may unknowingly burn resources protecting against or reacting to threats that could have been mitigated at the edge.

Positive impacts of proper bot management

Effective bot management ensures that server resources are prioritized for real users while still allowing beneficial bots to access your site. By filtering out harmful or unnecessary traffic, businesses can maintain faster load times and more reliable performance, especially during periods of high demand. This leads to a stronger user experience, increased engagement, and better results across marketing and sales channels.

Another key advantage is more accurate data. With bot traffic properly managed, analytics reflect true human behavior, enabling teams to make more informed decisions about content, conversion, and performance. WP Engine helps customers achieve this by deprioritizing self-identified bots and fine-tuning platform performance to surface meaningful user insights. Cleaner data means smarter strategies and greater impact.

Proper bot management also opens the door to emerging opportunities like Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). As LLMs become a primary way users discover content, it’s increasingly important for businesses to allow trusted LLM crawlers to index their sites. This positions their content to appear in generative search results and AI-powered discovery tools.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to LLM bot access. Each brand must consider which bots align with their audience and goals. By enabling the right bots and blocking the harmful ones, businesses can stay competitive and future-proof their digital presence.

WP Engine’s ongoing approach to bot management 

The WP Engine team has always and will continue to monitor the way bot traffic flows across sites on our hosting platform.

If you’re wondering how you can manage bots across your sites hosted on WP Engine, there are a few strategies that can get you started.

• Use robots.txt to control bot access and LLMS.txt to point LLMs to your best content.
• Implement bot detection tools and bot management solutions.
• Monitor website traffic for anomalies.
• Use rate limiting and firewalls.

As the future of bot traffic on the web is unknowable, it’s important to choose a hosting partner that’s already looking into solutions to prioritize the human experience on a website while creating a landscape where good, wanted bots can also thrive.

For example, new bandwidth visibility in the sites report section of the WP Engine User Portal now reflects traffic by region. If your sites are getting traffic from regions they don’t support, our experts can assist you in limiting that traffic.

Be the boss of your bots with WP Engine

WP Engine consistently and actively reviews how we refine our bot management strategy from the hosting side, so we can better prioritize human requests and ensure bots aren’t costing you more due to higher raw traffic volume. 

Want to learn more about the future state of bots on the web? Check out this DE{CODE} session that explores how bots and AI agents will affect digital engagement and how businesses can prepare for this AI-driven future, or talk to a representative to learn how WP Engine can help you get the most out of your bot traffic!