Bot traffic is the stream of automated requests that reach a site, mixing helpful monitors and indexers with scripts that scrape, test, or abuse.
Calling it traffic emphasizes the requests themselves, which is different from the device pool behind them and from the controls that respond.
How it works
Volume alone does not tell you the intent, because a search indexer, a price comparison partner, and a credential script can all arrive as non browser looking calls.
Classification uses identity of known agents, behavior over time, and whether the requests touch sensitive actions.
Unchecked abusive traffic raises cost, skews analytics, and can hide a smaller set of fraudulent sessions inside a noisy whole.
Teams should separate reporting for welcome automation and for unwanted automation so capacity planning and fraud reviews do not fight over one blended chart.
Concrete examples
- A status monitor requests one health page every minute and should remain welcome if it stays on that narrow path.
- A script reads every product page overnight, inflating view counts and copying prices the merchant did not publish for bulk reuse.
- Login attempts from automated clients arrive steadily all night, forming a traffic class distinct from daytime shoppers.
Protective measures
- Publish a policy for welcome automation, including how a partner identifies itself and which paths it may call.
- Split dashboards so abusive request volume is not mixed into conversion numbers that leadership uses for sales decisions.
- Put stricter handling on actions such as login and checkout than on pages you are happy for an indexer to read.
- Retain samples of automated sessions long enough to tell a partner monitor from a hostile script after a complaint.
How CDPCaptcha helps
Browser proof of work increases the expense of automated request streams because every scripted visit must perform extra computation in the browser.
CDPCaptcha is a self-hosted proof of work check in the browser, with no cookies, no tracking, and no picture puzzles.
It is made and hosted in the EU, in Germany, and the service is described at https://cdpcaptcha.com/.