Are We Addressing Bots With Website Content?

Website owners worldwide are always interested in who visits their website, what they look for and how long they spend there. New research shows however, that more than half the time we are catering content to bot visitors.

In 2012 research showed that just over 50% of traffic to websites was the result of bots rather than human visitors, well new research now shows that this number is only increasing. As of 2013 security CDN service Incapsula shows that more than 60% of website visitors are bots and just 38% of visitors are human. So does this mean that there is an increase in attacks by “bad” bots on websites? Not necessarily since bots are also “good” research gathering tools for search engines and the like. Some believe that this sharp increase in bot traffic indicates an increased effort by search engines to rank relevant content appropriately and index it more quickly than before.

The infographic pictured above from TechCrunch utilizes the data and information provided by Incapsula to plot these bot visitors; however, what is important to keep in mind is the fact that Incapsula based their data on information taken from their current client database. Just how large is the Incapsula database? 20,000 customers, this is hardly representative of all internet users; however, it is an interesting window in to a select sample population.