The Reason Why Online Bots Visit Your Website

Malicious online bots have been a pain for all types of online businesses including Ecommerce, airline, travel, listing and classified websites. According to our global bot protection data, more than half of all web traffic comes from online bots. Not all bots are bad; there are good bots which helps in increasing your site visibility and then there are bad bots which can destroy your website if you do not have a bot mitigation strategy in place.

There are definite reasons why online bots visit your website. Before taking any action, you must know the types of bots and the way they can impact your site. Here is a list of bots that you must be aware of to prevent them in the future.

1. Content Scrapers

These bots crawl your website to copy the content and use it to create their webpage without your permission. Content scrapers use automation to copy your content and post on their site as a new blog post. The result of content scraping can be poor SEO and or loss in advertising revenue.

2. Search Engine Spiders

These are also known as crawlers, are used by search engines to gather information about websites and individual web pages. Search engine spiders are also known as spiders, search engine indexers such as Googlebot and Bing bot. The search engines need information from all the sites and pages, or else they would not know what pages to display in response to a search query or with what priority. Search engine spiders improve website ranking but at times consume more bandwidth and resources.

3. Price Scrapers

These bots crawl around product and service web pages checking inventory numbers of stocks and prices by downloading the pages. Price scrapers always lift off your pricing data along with the product catalog information using automation. Competitors use this strategy to steal your dynamic pricing information in real-time so that they can attract price-sensitive buyers by keeping their prices lower than baseline prices in the marketplace. From price scraping, genuine resellers or price comparison sites generate business, but price competitors may undercut you.

4. Inventory Grabbers

It is also known as a denial of inventory; bad bots repeatedly add the limited stock item to their shopping cart without proceeding to payment, so that the item appears out of supply.

Spinning: when a valuable stock is held in a cart/basket until securing resale at a higher price.

Scalpers: transactional bots buy limited stock items such as tickets to a popular show and resell at inflated prices.

5. Odds Scrapers

These scraper bots crawl gambling websites, follow links to sporting events and pull out all the odds.

Price Matching: competitors copy or marginally better, odds.

Content Theft: Stealing intellectual property by scraping data feeds.

6. Account Takeover Bots

Account takeover attacks are sailing up among the highest cybersecurity threats that online businesses and consumers are currently facing. These are fraudulent bot attacks, frequent in the gaming industry.

Credential Cracking: bots accessing accounts through repeated login attempts

Credential Stuffing: bots trying login details from other compromised website accounts on your site.

7. Spammers

Also known as spambots, is a program designed to collect email addresses from the internet to build mailing lists for sending unsolicited emails/spam. These bots add a malicious or questionable link or information on the displayed content, database content or user messages. User base and site reputation appropriated for external promotions. Spamming leads to devalued content and damaged customer experience.

8. Card Scammer Bots

Fraudsters or attackers create and submit credit card number until they find a working combination. Payment fraud bots purchase and ship products globally at your expense when the transaction is refunded to the card owner. Small purchase validator bots run small deals looking for legitimate credit card numbers to sell on, leaving you with a customer chargeback penalty.

9. Automated Account Creators

Bots create fraudulent accounts and take advantage of new sign up offers without even purchasing any products or services. They consume loyalty offers such as gifts without being a paid customer. Authenticated accounts are sold on the dark web to be used for various malicious activities at scale.

10. Resource Hogs

Resource hogs are obsolete, bloated programs that continue to exist in some areas of the system, particularly older computers. All they can think about is finding ways to continue to feed their greedy appetite for system processing time and energy. Hungry bots designed to drain website performance by consuming infrastructure resources and cost companies in bandwidth. This leads to slow web pages, an increased rate in cart abandonment and decreased conversions. Customers become unhappy with the performance may leave the website and may never revisit or purchase from the site.

11. Pay Per Click Bots

Digital advertising bots destroy paid advertising campaigns, wasting money, damaging brand value and impacting click-through rates. Automated advert clicks are refunded back to clients at the publisher’s expense and embarrassment. Bots load web pages and purposely do not click on paid adverts to reduce click-through rates and damage brand reputation.

12. Credential Crackers

This attack involves identifying valid login credentials by trying various values for usernames and passwords. Bad actors use brute force attacks to guess and identify valid account credentials. Fraudsters target High-value gambling accounts. When accounts are compromised from another website's security breach, credential stuffers try those login details on sites with high-value accounts.

13. Gift Card Scammers

Bots can validate the balance on a gift card or check if a store card is linked to an authorized credit card. Bots obtain products for free while the customers who bought the gift card finds the balance empty. Bots test store cards to identify credit cards with pre-authorisation then make purchases at the expense of the consumer.

14. Vulnerability Scanners

Bots scan websites to quickly identify weaknesses and possible vulnerabilities or exploit unpatched zero-day threats. Vulnerability scanning includes both malicious scanning and known scanning by an authorized vulnerability scanning engine. Fingerprinting bots audit the foundations of a website collecting information about servers and software. Footprinting bots catalog all resources, web pages, directories, and URL's the analyze them for any vulnerabilities.

Real-Time Insights & Bot Prevention

• Discover what kind of bots are hitting your website currently and why


• Prevent bot traffic through a range of available methods such as blocking, redirection, serving CAPTCHA or alternate content and more.


• The above traditional methods may not work in front of advanced bots. Prevent advanced bot traffic using InfiSecure's bot mitigation solution, which blocks bad bot traffic in real-time without affecting your legitimate users.

Empower your business with control over bot traffic and the ability to identify and block malicious bot attacks in real-time.