Bot management and bot traffic are a major concern for website operators. These automated visitors often attempt to steal consumer data, add bad links to a site or spam contact forms.

Blocking these malicious visitors can help save your company money and ensure the quality of your online content. Unfortunately, many security tools and processes are ill-equipped to mitigate today’s bot threats.

Rules and reputation-based approaches such as JavaScript, WAFs or CDNs will only mitigate known bot threats and not the growing number of technically advanced bots that mimic human behavior. They also have no way of anticipating new domains and blocking bot traffic before it starts spreading around the web.

Mastering Bot Management: A Guide to Optimizing Your Bot Operations

Log files are another useful tool for identifying bots and blocking them. The logs of a website contain all network requests to the website and can be used to identify suspicious IP addresses. However, this is a time-consuming process and will only stop a small fraction of malicious traffic.

The ability to block bots is vital for the success of any business. When an influx of bots or spiders crawls your site, they can quickly eat up your bandwidth and drain your credit.

If you notice a sudden spike in the number of requests to your website, it’s a good idea to check the logs. This will help you pinpoint the IP address of any bots that are trying to crawl your site.

Bots can look nearly identical to legitimate users, with an IP address and other user-identifying data. But if you dig into in-depth analytics and other request data, you can easily spot the gaps in bots’ disguises and block them before they can take control of your website.