A new report from Distil Network came out looking at the state of traffic on the Internet. This is the third annual report that looks largely at how bots and any other non-human traffic is impacting the web today. Some good news to start with is that more total traffic is now coming from humans than bots, which is certainly a good thing and something that hasn’t happened since 2013.
In this report it was found that bots are responsible for about 46% of total Internet traffic. This is obviously a very significant amount, and something that should be a cause for concern to any marketers or others engaged in online activities.
No all bot traffic is bad, however. Most of it, 28%, is actually from ‘non-malicious bots’ which are from search engines and other reputable tools. These types of bots are out there looking for content and generally helping the web run the way it is supposed to.
It is the other 18%, however, that people need to worry about. This traffic is from malicious bots that are engaged in things like ad-fraud, brute-force attacks, spam and other negative things.
What’s worse is, according to the report, that the bots that are in place are much more advanced than those used in the past. In fact, about 88% of the bad bots are now considered ‘highly sophisticated.’ They are commonly called APBs or Advanced Persistent Bots. The more basic bots are much easier spot and block thanks to modern security software and things like that. While they can’t be ignored, they are largely falling out of favor by the bad actors in the industry because they are so ineffective.
The report goes into much greater detail on things like which industries are getting hit the hardest, what size websites are the biggest targets and much more. If you’re worried about malicious bot traffic (and all of us should be) make sure you take a look at this report, which can be found HERE.
