If you’re not plugged into the tech world like your favorite Charlotte web design company (us), you may be unaware that bad bots make up 37% of all internet traffic! According to a report from Imperva, “AI is not only being used by attackers to create more advanced, evasive bots that target APIs, exploit business logic, and fuel fraud, but it is also lowering the barrier to entry for attackers.” This means more bot attacks, aka security risks. The report also found, “For the first time in a decade, automated traffic has surpassed human activity, accounting for 51% of all web traffic.”

When I say “bots,” I don’t mean the little automated message thingy you chat with for customer service. I mean ChatGPT, Claude, and other large language models (LLMs), aka, AI models. You might be saying, “Um, OK. Why should I care?” It’s a fair question. Some bots crawl your website and help with search results. Others, like social media bots, generate link previews when people share your content. Others monitor your website. And some bots (like Perplexity) will site your content when answering user queries.

However, there are other kinds of bots.

Beware these Bad Bots

Some bots are unequivocally bad. Content scrapers steal your articles, product descriptions, and images. Others will spam your forms. (“Contact me for a mail-order bride,” anyone?) And some bots even try to hack your website. These are bad bots. They affect your hosting expenses, security, and data accuracy.

Keep in mind that every bot visit uses your bandwidth, processing power, and storage. If you’re on a shared hosting plan, you won’t see direct costs. But if you’re not, the costs can add up quickly. (If you don’t know what’s what regarding your hosting, you can check in with your web developer. And if you’re looking for a Charlotte web developer, well, you know where to find us. . .)

Regardless of whether you’re paying for hosting costs, too many bots can slow down your site’s performance. Ay caramba! And again, security becomes an issue.

Spamming, But Turn Up the Dial

Because bots are, well, bots, they can be programmed to spam you. Like a lot. They look for vulnerabilities, try to hack into the backend of your website, and flood your forms with junk requests. And because most websites have basic security, a small business website is a perfect target. Dun dun duuuuunnnnn. We use Askimet to block spam entries but blocking bots is a different thing.

Lastly, bots can really skew your analytics. High traffic but low conversion rates? Could be because of bots! But it’s hard to distinguish that in the backend depending on who you host with.

As a Charlotte web design company, we like Dreamhost because it has a traffic tab in the Dreamhost panel. It gives you a clear view of traffic activity, including bot behavior. You can monitor spikes, detect anomalies, and track how many bots may be impacting your site. And unlike regular analytics, the Dreamhost panel helps to distinguish between human and bot traffic; view it by IP, referrer, or user agent; and spot patterns early so you can take action. However, even if you don’t have Dreamhost, as a Charlotte web designer, we can help you figure this out.

Kick Bad Bots to the Curb

Kicking bad bots to the curb is a little complicated. It’s important to not kick out the good bots. We recommend setting up a robots.txt file. This means creating or updating the file in your website’s root directory with specific instructions for different bot types:

# Block AI training crawlers

User-agent: GPTBot

Disallow: /

User-agent: anthropic-ai

Disallow: /

User-agent: Google-Extended

Disallow: /

# Allow search engines

User-agent: Googlebot

Allow: /

User-agent: Bingbot

Allow: /

# Allow AI search bots that cite sources

User-agent: ChatGPT-User

Allow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot

Allow: /

If you don’t know how to update the robots.txt file and you use WordPress, you can try the WP Robots Txt plugin that lets you edit the file from your WordPress dashboard. This will work for well-behaved bots but malicious bots are, well, malicious.

Other plugins we recommend as a Charlotte web developer are the following:

• WP Cerber Security:Provides comprehensive bot protection, including login attempt limiting, IP blocking, and advanced bot detection algorithms.
• All-In-One Security (AIOS):Offers firewall features and bot blocking capabilities suitable for small business websites.

The reality is bot traffic is only going to get worse and robots outnumber humans 3 to 1 on the internet, according to some estimates. You don’t have to be scared but as they say, forewarned is forearmed.

If this all sounds complicated, never fear, Web Symphonies is here. As a Charlotte web design company, we can help you create a bot management plan AND a beautiful website that people want to actually visit. Reach out to us today.

Get in touch with us via email or call (704) 336-9113.

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