Bots

In short: A bot (short for robot) is a program that carries out tasks automatically and much faster than a human.

In more detail: Bots make up a large part of internet traffic. Whether a bot is useful or harmful depends on its purpose.

In Depth

Useful bots

• Search engine crawlers that read pages for the index.
• Chatbots and assistants that answer questions.
• Bots on chat platforms such as Discord for moderation, music or reminders.
• Monitoring bots that check whether a site is reachable.

Harmful bots

• Spam bots that flood comments and forms.
• Scrapers that grab content or prices.
• Credential-stuffing bots that try stolen login data.
• Botnets: many hijacked devices attacking together, e.g. in a DDoS. See botnets.

Dealing with them

Good bots follow rules such as robots.txt. Against bad ones, bot protection, rate limiting and a firewall help. The share of bot requests in the traffic should also be watched.

See also: botnets, crawler, Discord