9. Most web traffic comes from bots, but there are less spam bots
Another interesting thing about internet traffic is that most of it isn’t even generated by us humans. Instead it’s the bots, automated software programs designed to perform specific tasks. According to an Incapsula report bot traffic accounts for over 60% of all web traffic.
An example of bots are search engine bots also known as web crawlers, most well known of which is the Googlebot. They visit and scan web sites to update their search engine databases. There are other well meaning bots, and together these well purposed bots account for 31% of all that traffic.
The rest are malicious, most of which are so called impersonators which gather marketing intelligence, perform DDOS attacks and so on. Some of them are scrapers which steal and copy other people’s web content, hacking tools for data theft, malware infection or website hijacking and defacement.
A tiny portion are spam bots, at just 0.5%. The number of spam bots has decreased by 75% between 2012 and 2013, probably thanks to powerful anti-spam campaigns orchestrated by Google and others.
Photo by Kevan.
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