The good news is that the 42% of web traffic determined to be bots is less than earlier research has found. The bad news is that it's AI scraping the web, not Asian traffic farms clicking on it, and these AI bots are much harder to detect and differentiate from humans. And some of it is extremely malicious.
Although some bots are beneficial to business, web scraper bots are being used for competitive intelligence and espionage, inventory hoarding, imposter site creation, and other schemes that have a negative impact on both the bottom line and the customer experience.
There are no existing laws that prohibit the use of scraper bots, and they are hard to detect due to the rise of AI botnets, but there are some things companies can do to mitigate them. …Technical impacts that organizations face as a result of being scraped, whether the scraping was done with malicious or beneficial intentions, include website performance degradation, site metric pollution, compromised credentials attacks from phishing sites, increased compute costs, and more.
"Metric pollution" is a great name for a generative slopcore band.
Previously: Right-wing media's traffic nosedive: what happened?
