Bot Traffic
01 Definition
Bot Traffic meaning: Automated, non-human visits or interactions generated by software rather than real people.
Bot traffic is activity produced by automated programs. Some bots are legitimate, like search engine crawlers, while others load pages or click ads to commit fraud or scrape content. In advertising, malicious bots inflate impressions and clicks and waste budget. Filtering separates good bots from bad, but detection is never perfect.
Also called
Why it matters
How Bot Traffic fits the work
Bot traffic can quietly make up a large share of ad interactions, so recognizing it helps advertisers avoid paying for engagement that no human ever produced.
In context
Traffic analysis showed a nightly surge of visits from a single data center, which turned out to be bot traffic clicking ads rather than real users.
Practical note
Not all bots are fraud; legitimate crawlers should be excluded from performance analysis too, or they will distort session counts and conversion rates.