According to new research from Distil Networks, the majority of internet traffic is generated by non-human entities, as data shows that traffic generated by bots this year represents 59 percent of total website traffic 
[alert variation=”alert-info”]Comparatively, over the past year, bots accounted for 45 percent of all traffic to Distil Networks client websites.[/alert]
Distil Networks CEO Rami Essaid said the majority of traffic is generated by “good bots,” such as those used by search engines and social networking sites. These bots comply with “robot.txt” files – which webmasters use to instruct web robots – and are valuable to the websites they visit.
Essaid attributed the increase in bot traffic to more aggressive indexing by Bing, as well as new search engines that have appeared on the internet.
“Good bots” account for 36 percent of total traffic this year, up from 21 percent last year. “Bad bots” account for 23 percent of total traffic this year, down from 24 percent last year. Note that this decrease does not reflect a decrease in the volume of malicious bots, but is due to a dramatic increase in “good bots.” Human traffic accounted for just 41 percent of total website traffic.
The company defines “bad bots” as those that do not respect “robots.txt” files and do not provide value to the websites they visit. Bad bots fall into three categories. The largest of these are unwanted bots that mine data from websites – specialized bots used, for example, by business competitors to mass-collect pricing information. There are also malicious bots that scan websites, looking for vulnerabilities in them. The smallest category, which represents just 10 percent of malicious bots, are those that engage in click fraud, attempt brute force login attempts or try to post spam messages to websites.
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