Guide To Detecting Bot Traffic
Free IP lookup API to uncover fraud, bots, and high risk users.
Have you ever stared at your analytics dashboard, watching impressive traffic numbers roll in, only to see zero conversions or sales? Or discovered your “viral” content spike consisted entirely of visitors who bounced within seconds? If these scenarios sound familiar, you’re likely encountering the hidden epidemic of bot traffic, and you’re not alone in this frustration.
For most businesses, their website represents a substantial investment, and if investment gets compromised by fake traffic, it’s not only the numbers on a screen – it’s wasted ad spend, corrupted decision-making data, and missed opportunities to connect with real customers. The question isn’t whether your site might be affected by bot traffic; it’s how much, and what you’re going to do about it.
So how do you detect bot traffic? Is there a magical “bot checker” you can use? We’ll cover these answers and more in the following sections by evaluating the bot detection signals and tools available to you.
How Bots Are Detected
Protecting your website from bot traffic requires combining multiple detection techniques and keeping constant vigilance. Each method offers unique advantages and covers multiple attack vectors, making them most effective when used together as part of a layered security strategy.
IP and Geolocation Analysis
IP analysis forms the foundation of bot detection. This technique involves monitoring IP addresses and cross-referencing them against known IP bot databases, and flagging traffic from suspicious geographical locations.
IP analysis is effective for assessing the risk of a user with a specific IP address and location may be a bot or bad actor. IP blocking after a bad IP address is identified is commonly used to mitigate DDoS attacks.
How it’s implemented: IP risk scoring and blocking can be integrated into a website’s tech stack with an API.
Behavioral Analysis
Representing the next frontier in bot detection, this method evaluates how visitors interact with your site. This method tracks mouse movements, keystroke patterns, scrolling behavior, and navigation flows to identify unnatural patterns suggesting automated activity.
While humans exhibit organic, slightly erratic movements, bots often display perfectly linear mouse paths or impossible interaction speeds. This technique excels at catching sophisticated bots attempting to mimic human behavior but fall short of replicating genuine user patterns
How it’s implemented: Analytics tools designed to identify and odd behavior patterns for review can be added to tracking software.
Device Fingerprinting
Creates a unique identifier for each visitor based on their browser configuration, operating system, installed plugins, and hardware specifications. This technique is valuable for identifying bots using headless browsers, virtual machines, or emulators lacking the full complement of features found on genuine user devices.
Advanced fingerprinting can detect inconsistencies like missing plugins or unusual hardware configurations indicative of traffic.
How it’s implemented: Tools tracking device data and anomalies connect to a server via an API to analyze incoming users.
Traffic Source Analysis
Examines how visitors arrive at your site, analyzing referral URLs and entry points for suspicious patterns. Legitimate users typically arrive through search engines, social media, or direct navigation, while bot traffic often originates from obscure domains, malicious networks, or shows unnatural referral patterns. This method helps identify traffic farms and coordinated bot attacks.
How it’s implemented: Segment traffic source data in analytics and compare data against baselines.
Bot-Detection Bots (Machine Learning Models)
On the cutting edge of bot detection, using supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms to analyze vast amounts of behavioral and technical data. These systems can identify evolving bot patterns and detect previously unknown threats by recognizing subtle anomalies in traffic patterns.
How it’s implemented: Integrated tools as part of proprietary bot detection technology and APIs.
Web Application Firewalls
Serve as the first line of defense, filtering incoming requests based on predefined rules and real-time threat intelligence. They’re effective at blocking known attack vectors, malicious IP ranges, and common bot signatures before they reach your application.
How it’s implemented: System admins can set firewall settings to protect against basic bot attacks.
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Signs Of Bot Traffic
When a bot pings your server and interacts with your website, it can exhibit tell-tale behavior differentiating it from legitimate users. There are three main indicators your site may be getting hit with bot traffic: 1) Overall traffic patterns; 2) Individual user behavior signals; 3) Technical anomalies; and 4) Atypical conversion data.
Abnormal Traffic Patterns
How can you know if you have an influx of bad bot traffic on your website? There may be clues and using Google Analytics or another tool used to analyze website traffic, check for trends such as:
- A boost in traffic at odd hours: Sure, the online world runs 24/7, and visitors may come to your site at any time, but too many visitors in the less-active hours, like in the middle of the night, may indicate these late-night views are bots.
- A sudden increase in page views: A drastic spike in page views, primarily if that doesn’t correspond to an increase in traffic quality and site conversion, could be a clue much of the new traffic is fraudulent bots.
- Increase bounce rates: The typical site visitor spends at least a few seconds on a page, often longer. Site visitor habits may include looking through a homepage, looking up products or bios, reading reviews or blog entries, watching videos, checking out products, and pricing – all of which take more than a few seconds. Bot visitors, however, will often only stage on a page for a fraction of a second and bounce.
- Drop in conversation rates: Large amounts of traffic with much-worse-than-usual conversion rates or low-quality conversions can indicate bots visiting a page but failing to make a conversion action.
Behavioral Signals
Bots will try to mimic human behavior but will leave patterns behind indicating an automated bot. Unlike humans, bots are programmed to act a certain way, so if you can identify patterns in the programming, you can spot possible bot behavior.
- Identical user behavior: Bots often perform repetitive actions, such as clicking the same links or navigating pages in a set pattern, unlike the varied browsing of humans. If you see sets of users acting exactly alike, they could bots following the same programming.
- Fast browsing: Rapid navigation and interactions occurring faster than humanly possible (e.g., multiple clicks per second) are obvious bot signals.
Technical Anomalies
Bot traffic attempts to hide itself by cloaking, masking or proxying itself in several of ways. However, by doing this, they can leave behind pieces of data that when compared to legitimate user behavior, reveal the presence of bots.
- Atypical data: Consistent user agent strings across many requests, outdated or incomplete browser configurations, or identical device fingerprints can indicate automation and show up as anomalous user data.
- IP origin: Requests from known data centers, proxies, or VPNs, especially when combined with other suspicious traits, should be scrutinized
What To Do About Bad Bot Traffic
Harmful bot activity can leave a site needing more work and attention than it should. An inundated website with bots may slow down or malfunction, making it harder for actual visitors to use the site as intended. Getting to the root of the bot problem as soon as possible is the best course of action.
Checking for signs of bad bot traffic is a good start. Finding an excellent anti-fraud solution is another good option. The bot-stopping solutions from Fraudlogix can prevent bots from taking over your website. Do you have questions about our products or want to know more about keeping bots away from your website? Contact us today to get started.