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Key Takeaways
Good bots enhance digital experiences by assisting users and providing valuable data.
Bad bots pose threats by disrupting website functionality, stealing data, and manipulating online services.
Bot traffic, whether good or bad, impacts websites significantly, affecting search engine visibility, security, and user experience.
Managing bot traffic effectively involves allowing beneficial bots while blocking or mitigating the impact of malicious ones.
Specialized tools, like WP Engine Global Edge Security, can help site owners get a better understanding of bot traffic on their site, limit bots based on type or region, and lock down access when under attack.
Imagine logging into your analytics dashboard and seeing a surge in website traffic—only to realize it’s not real users but bots flooding your site.
Not long ago, this might have sounded like something out of a sci-fi movie, but today, bots—software-driven agents that automate digital tasks—are everywhere, operating at a speed and scale humans simply cannot match. According to some reports, they now account for nearly half of all online activity!
But that’s not to say all bots are the same. In fact, they vary widely in purpose, behavior, and impact—some can benefit your site, while others can harm it. With that in mind, distinguishing between “good” and “bad” bots and effectively managing their activity has become a key part of protecting site performance, security, and reliability.
In this article, we’ll explain what bots are, how they impact websites, and the best strategies for managing them.
Bots 101: What are they and how do they work?
Bots are software applications programmed to perform automated tasks online. They operate without direct human intervention, executing repetitive or large-scale functions faster and often more efficiently than humans.
Bots are already used across industries for a variety of tasks, including:
- Search engines rely on bots to index web pages and rank search results.
- Businesses use them for customer service chatbots that provide 24/7 support.
- Financial markets deploy bots to execute stock trades in milliseconds.
- Web monitoring services use bots to track website uptime and detect fraud.
- Social media platforms rely on bots to automate content distribution and engagement tracking.
While bots are often used for helpful tasks, their impact depends on how they’re designed and deployed. Some enhance efficiency and improve user experiences, while others are built with malicious intent, engaging in activities like data scraping, spamming, and cyberattacks.
Understanding this distinction is critical for maintaining a secure and functional online environment.
Rise of the helpful bots:
Good bots and their benefits
Good bots are those that operate with transparency, follow ethical guidelines, and enhance digital experiences—and they’ve been around since the earliest days of the internet.
One of the first and most important types of bots, search engine crawlers, helped organize the web and made information more accessible. Over time, bots expanded into a wide range of functions, from customer support to security monitoring, and many other use cases, some of which are listed below
Overall, good bots are typically designed to assist users, improve digital services, and provide valuable data without disrupting online ecosystems.
Here are a few common types:
- Search engine crawlers: Googlebot, Bingbot, and other search engine crawlers scan and index web pages to provide relevant search results.
- Chatbots and virtual assistants: AI-powered bots like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini help users answer questions, automate customer service, and generate content.
- Monitoring and performance bots: Services like UptimeRobot and Google Lighthouse analyze website speed, security, and uptime.
- Feed fetchers: Bots like Feedly fetch RSS feeds to help users stay updated with content from different websites.
- Content aggregators: Platforms like Google News use bots to gather news articles and deliver relevant stories to users.
Good bots generally adhere to industry standards, respect website preferences, and avoid overburdening servers.
However, not all bots are benign; some are designed with malicious intent, often masquerading as legitimate traffic to evade detection.
The dark side of automation: Bad bots and their threats
Not all bots are friendly—some are downright bad. These types of bots are typically programmed to disrupt website functionality, steal data, and manipulate online services.
Bad bots often ignore accepted rules, evade detection, and operate with harmful intent. Here are some of the most common types:
- Scraper bots: These bots extract content or pricing data from websites without permission, often leading to intellectual property theft or unfair competition.
- Spam bots: Automated scripts that flood websites, forums, and social media with fake comments, reviews, and messages, cluttering platforms and damaging credibility.
- Credential stuffing bots: Cybercriminals use these bots to test stolen usernames and passwords across multiple sites in an attempt to gain unauthorized access.
- DDoS attack bots: These bots overwhelm a website with excessive traffic, causing slowdowns or crashes. In 2016, a massive DDoS attack powered by the Mirai botnet took down major sites like Twitter, PayPal, and Netflix.
- Ad fraud bots: Designed to mimic human clicks on ads, these bots generate fake traffic, deceiving advertisers and wasting marketing budgets.
Since bad bots often disguise themselves as legitimate traffic, detecting and mitigating their impact often requires advanced security measures.
The gray area: Unverified bots
Beyond explicitly beneficial or openly malicious bots are the bots that refuse to self-identify or declare what they are up to. These are unverified bots, and they represent the true “black box” of modern web traffic. Instead of operating transparently, these bots often masquerade as human visitors or pretend to be legitimate search crawlers to sneak past basic firewall protections.
While they might not be launching an active cyberattack, they are far from harmless. These unverified bots are often automated scrapers harvesting your unique content or tracking your pricing data, all while quietly inflating your infrastructure costs and skewing critical marketing data. For growing websites crossing the critical threshold of 5k+ monthly visitors, this unmanaged traffic is a silent profit killer.
This is precisely why GES includes Enhanced Traffic Visibility. It turns ambiguous web traffic into a clear roadmap, allowing you to easily identify what’s hitting your digital doorstep. With GES, you gain the enterprise-grade control needed to deploy Customizable Access Rules, blocking or challenging these unwanted guests at the edge before they ever reach your server.
Beyond human: Bot traffic explained
Bot traffic refers to any non-human interaction with a website, whether from good or bad bots.
From search engines indexing pages to cybercriminals attempting account breaches, bots interact with websites in countless ways—some helpful, others harmful.
Given the high percentage of bot activity on the web (and no sign of it abating), website owners should monitor bot activity carefully—both to capitalize on beneficial automation and to protect against the risks posed by malicious bots.
How bot traffic impacts websites
As noted, some bot traffic is beneficial; however, excessive or malicious bot activity can create significant challenges for website owners.
Bots can influence everything from search engine visibility to security vulnerabilities and infrastructure costs. When left unchecked, bot traffic can distort analytics, degrade user experience, and even lead to system outages.
This fundamental shift from a human-centric internet to one where automated traffic is the majority is a core theme of our DE{CODE} session, Good Bots, Bad Bots: How to Win with Bot Management. In this talk, experts from WP Engine, Cloudflare, and Useful Group discuss how five years of traffic evolution have condensed into just six months.
Understanding how different types of bots affect a website is essential for managing their impact effectively. Here’s a breakdown:
- SEO and indexing: Good bots from search engines help websites rank in search results, but excessive bot traffic can slow down site performance.
- Security threats: Malicious bots can attempt to breach security measures, steal data, or disrupt services.
- Analytics distortion: High bot traffic can inflate website metrics, making it difficult to analyze real user behavior.
- Server strain: A surge in bot activity, even from good bots, can consume bandwidth and increase server costs.
WP Engine Global Edge Security (GES) solves this through Edge-Side Optimization, utilizing Edge Full Page Caching and automated image optimization. By filtering traffic and optimizing content at the edge, you ensure peak performance and a frustration-free journey for real customers, even during unpredictable traffic spikes, while protecting your infrastructure from the unnecessary costs of unmanaged bot traffic.
Separating friend from foe: How to manage bots effectively
Since not all bot traffic is harmful, the goal is to allow beneficial bots while blocking or mitigating the impact of malicious ones.
Striking this balance is key—overly aggressive bot-blocking measures can interfere with useful automation, while lax security can leave a site vulnerable to scraping, spam, or cyberattacks.
To manage bots effectively, it’s critical to first understand how bots interact with your website. Look for unusual traffic spikes, repetitive requests, or traffic originating from unexpected locations.
Once you have visibility into bot behavior, you can implement a layered defense strategy that protects against harmful activity while allowing beneficial bots to operate.
Here are a few key strategies to manage bots effectively:
Use robots.txt to control bot access
The robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which pages they can and cannot access. While good bots follow these instructions, bad bots often ignore them.
To make the most of this tool, ensure your robots.txt file is properly configured, restricting access to sensitive or unnecessary pages while allowing essential indexing.
You can also go beyond basic configurations and use the Crawl-delay directive to limit how frequently bots request pages, preventing unnecessary server strain. More technical users can pair robots.txt with server-side access controls (like .htaccess rules or Nginx configurations) to block specific user agents or IPs known for bot abuse.
Implement bot detection tools
Services like Cloudflare, Akamai, and reCAPTCHA use behavioral analysis and machine learning to detect and filter out bad bots. These tools can differentiate between human users and automated scripts, reducing the risk of fraud, spam, and unauthorized access.
Make sure these solutions are configured to suit your website’s traffic patterns, balancing security with user experience. You can also enable bot scoring and challenge-response tests with tools like Cloudflare’s Bot Score API or Google’s reCAPTCHA Enterprise, which both challenge suspicious visitors dynamically.
Overall, as bot traffic continues to rise, employing some type of bot detection solution (or solutions) has become a near-necessity for many websites.
Monitor website traffic for anomalies
Unusual spikes in traffic, increased failed login attempts, or excessive page requests may indicate bot activity. While automated alerts will notify you of suspicious activity, web analytics tools can also help track these patterns.
Traditional security advice recommends piecing together server logs, Google Analytics, and complex SIEM tools like Splunk or Datadog to spot these patterns, but doing so requires significant developer hours and enterprise-scale budgets.
Instead of forcing you to manually hunt through disparate data sources, GES features an integrated Traffic and Security Dashboard, with traffic sorted into Human, Verified bot, Automated, or Likely automated.
Use rate limiting and firewalls
Rate limiting restricts the number of requests a single user or bot can make within a given timeframe, helping prevent excessive scraping, credential stuffing, and brute-force login attempts.
Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) block known malicious bots before they reach your site.
Both can help you keep up with emerging threats, but it’s important to ensure your rate limits are set up correctly and your firewall rules are updated regularly. You can also implement geofencing rules to restrict bot-heavy traffic from specific regions where you don’t expect legitimate visitors.
While standard firewalls are a start, GES introduces Customizable Access Rules that allow you to enact a strategy specific to your business needs. You can now granularly allow or block traffic based on categories (such as specific AI scrapers) or geographic regions at the edge, before they ever hit your server. Furthermore, if your site faces a sudden surge, you can activate the Under Attack Mode with a single click to instantly harden your defenses.
For more advanced use cases, you can employ device fingerprinting in tandem with rate limiting. Bots often rotate IPs, but they struggle to change browser characteristics—detect patterns in user-agent strings, screen resolutions, and browser plugins to identify repeat offenders.
Leverage bot management solutions
Advanced security solutions, like GES, offer bot management tools that dynamically distinguish between good and bad bots. Unlike static blocking measures, these tools continuously adapt to evolving bot tactics and minimize false positives. GES also introduces an intelligent traffic management framework that includes Enhanced Traffic Visibility, giving you advanced insights into the human and bot traffic hitting your site. Rather than treating all bots as a single category, the new Traffic and Security page in the WP Engine User Portal provides greater clarity, distinguishing between human visitors, verified search agents, AI crawlers, and malicious actors. This turns the “black box” of web traffic into a clear roadmap for informed business decisions.
Consider using adaptable solutions that can respond to evolving bot behavior and integrate them with existing security measures to create a multi-layered defense against malicious traffic.
You may also consider tools that offer API security features—if your website uses public APIs, it’s important to ensure you have token-based authentication, rate limiting, and anomaly detection for API endpoints. Bots often target APIs instead of web pages for easier data extraction.
By applying these strategies, businesses can minimize the risks associated with bad bots while allowing helpful bots to continue improving search visibility, website performance, and user experience.
For agencies, managing security across a diverse client portfolio can be a drain on billable hours. GES is a “set it and forget it” solution that reduces manual firefighting. By bundling these advanced bot management tools into their offerings, agencies can protect their clients’ hard-earned reputations while creating a high-margin premium service.
Conclusion: Finding the right bot balance
Bots are an integral part of the internet, but distinguishing between good and bad bots is critical for website security and performance.
While search engines and AI assistants use bots to enhance digital experiences, malicious bots pose serious risks to businesses and users alike. The key to effective bot management is finding the right balance—allowing good bots to operate while blocking the harmful ones.
By monitoring traffic, using firewalls, and deploying bot detection tools, organizations can protect their websites and ensure a secure, efficient online experience.
See how WP Engine can give you enterprise-grade control over your site traffic here, or chat with a representative to find out more.
