{"id":9910,"date":"2018-11-06T11:52:50","date_gmt":"2018-11-06T11:52:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.webscale.com\/?post_type=blog&p=9910"},"modified":"2023-12-29T08:20:19","modified_gmt":"2023-12-29T13:20:19","slug":"bots-good-bad-malicious","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.webscale.com\/blog\/bots-good-bad-malicious\/","title":{"rendered":"Bots \u2013 The Good, The Bad, and The Malicious"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Google CEO Sundar Pichai demonstrated the company\u2019s AI-powered Google Assistant\u2019s capabilities earlier this year, we all watched in awe as a highly sophisticated bot made a hair salon reservation navigating through the nuances of a normal conversation, making it indistinguishable from a human.<\/p>\n

Bots have, indeed, come a long way. And if you live and breathe e-commerce every day like we do, you might be encountering them much more than you might realize. In fact, up to half of your online storefront\u2019s traffic <\/strong>can be bots. Yep, up to 50%!<\/p>\n

Not all bots are the same though. You have good ones, bad ones, and really <\/em>bad ones! It\u2019s essential to learn how to identify and classify bots, so as to manage them effectively, and improve your online storefront\u2019s security, performance, infrastructure efficiency, SEO, and analytics.<\/p>\n

The Good<\/h3>\n

Good bots can be found everywhere. Search engine crawlers (from Google, Bing, Baidu, and others) constantly crawl the web looking for new pages to determine how they should be indexed. This is critical for search engines, without it they are unable to rank pages (based on keywords and intent).<\/p>\n

Bots can be very useful. There are those that scan different websites for the best deals for a product, that give you the latest weather or news, or even ones that continuously monitor sites for performance and downtime.<\/p>\n

Then you have bots that facilitate conversational commerce \u2013 commonly known as chatbots. Chatbots can help you navigate an e-commerce site more effectively. They can also answer questions you may have about product features or aesthetics (for example, the color of a particular product, or whether it\u2019s available in a particular size). This helps deliver personalization for your users, as well as significantly improved engagement, ultimately resulting in increased stickiness, higher conversion rates, and reduced support costs.<\/p>\n

The Bad<\/h3>\n

Content and price scrapers can sneak into your site either unannounced or under the guise of being humans or good bots. These bots work mostly for your competitors or people that want to analyze your product listings, inventory, and price points. While their impact is not directly visible on your infrastructure, this behavior allows them to gain an unfair competitive advantage, diminishing your hard-earned market differentiation.<\/p>\n

Scrapers can also be \u201cemployed\u201d by people that want to replicate your website in a different domain, passing themselves off as you. This results in traffic getting diverted from your site and causes significant damage to your revenue and reputation \u2013 the latter of which has longer-term consequences and is much harder to recover from.<\/p>\n

The Malicious<\/h3>\n

Malicious bots are the really <\/em>bad ones. Their intent is to cause severe harm, directly or indirectly affecting revenue. These bots are employed by mostly cyber-criminals or hackers to attack your site or application, either gradually or through the use of brute force. These bots are capable of causing serious damage to your online business via a variety of attacks, including the following:<\/p>\n