A guide to bot detection tools

A bot detection tool is a software solution designed to distinguish and identify automated bot traffic from genuine human interactions on websites, apps, devices, or networks. By analyzing behavior patterns, device characteristics, operating systems, and other data points, these tools help differentiate legitimate users from harmful bots, which can be used for various tasks like credential stuffing, web scraping, and account takeover attacks. Bot detection not only protects against digital fraud and cyberattacks (75% of which come from bots) but also enables organizations to better understand their online traffic.

Bot detection tools differentiate between human and robotic traffic to protect websites, applications, APIs, and anything else in a digital environment. To make that differentiation, bot detection tools analyze and identify patterns, behaviors, and characteristics in digital interactions that distinguish bots from genuine users. This may include behavioral analysis to spot repetitive or unnatural patterns, device fingerprinting, IP and network analysis, and advanced machine learning.   To be effective, bot detection tools must determine whether traffic is legitimate within a matter of milliseconds. Anything longer can impact page load speed and cause a considerable disruption to the user experience.

Bot detection tools are critical to maintaining a safe digital environment and protecting businesses’ digital assets and budgets. These tools prevent ad fraud, preserve inventory, and ensure that marketing dollars are spent on legitimate users by identifying and filtering out malicious bots.

Bots aim to waste ad spend and ultimately want to drain your resources and interfere with your customers’ experience. Without reliable bot management solutions in place, your website can become vulnerable to these attacks. Efficient bot detection keeps digital platforms fast, functional, and free of automated abuse. Implementing effective practices allows organizations to reduce this strain on servers and IT infrastructure, enhance data integrity, and strengthen cybersecurity across websites and apps.

A bot detection tool can prevent any attack that makes use of a bad bot. Some of the most common attacks include:

• Account takeover: Where malicious actors gain access to a customer’s account to make fraudulent purchases, cash in on loyalty points, or cause reputational damage.
• Credential stuffing: Where malicious actors use credentials (often from a data leak) to gain access to accounts.
• Web scraping: The automated process of extracting large amounts of data from websites for analysis, often using specialized software or bots.
• Transaction abuse: Involves actions like carding, where stolen credit card credentials are tested with small purchases.
• DDoS attacks: Where bad actors take over a website or application with high volumes of traffic, causing slowdowns, outages, and disruptions that impact user experience and business operations.

Choosing a bot detection tool is about spotting automation and understanding user behavior at scale. Efficient solutions don’t solely rely on detecting bots. Instead, they layer detection methods, including behavioral analysis, machine learning, and device fingerprinting. Tools that operate in real time, integrate cleanly with your existing infrastructure, and offer transparency into how decisions are made should be your main priority when finding the right tool for your business.

The right tool should closely align with the entire structure of your organization’s security strategy to reduce risk and free up internal resources. Capabilities like intent-based detection, traffic risk scoring, and detailed analytics can help teams respond quickly without having to sacrifice user experience for legitimate users.

In a digital environment where bots continue to become more sophisticated and complex, choosing a solution built to act ahead can mean fewer disruptions and stronger defenses.

Bot detection tools use a combination of methods to quietly detect and block malicious bots. Here are a few effective bot detection software features:

• Device fingerprinting: Collects data on a user’s device and browser configuration to help distinguish between legitimate users and bots that may be trying to disguise their identity.
• Web Application Firewall (WAF) integration: Works alongside WAFs to monitor and filter HTTP traffic and block known malicious sources and suspicious behavior in real time. Many WAFs offer add-on bot detection tools, but specialist solutions will provide more robust detection against advanced threats and customizable mitigation actions.
• Real-time detection and response: Instantly analyzes traffic patterns to flag and respond to bots as they appear. This minimizes potential damage before it escalates.
• Machine learning and AI: Continuously learns from sophisticated bot behavior to improve detection accuracy.
• Pattern and anomaly analysis: Identifies unusual activity, like repeated logins or unusual navigation speeds, to surface automation attempts that may evade traditional filters.
• Traffic analysis: Reviews the volume, origin, and intent of incoming traffic to separate organic human activity from high-volume automated behavior.
• Behavioral monitoring: Tracks how users interact with a site, like mouse movements, keystrokes, and click paths, to detect strange non-humanlike behavior that signals bot activity.
• CAPTCHA and challenges: Uses invisible challenges or frictionless authentication techniques to verify human presence without impacting the user experience.
• Geofencing and IP reputation scoring: Flags suspicious traffic based on unusual geographic origin or known blacklisted IPs and anonymizing services like proxies or VPNs.

Bot detection and mitigation take the efforts of many solutions to offer a comprehensive way to protect your organization’s digital environment. This starts with the right balance of adaptable and sophisticated technologies to stop bad bots before they overtake your website with attacks.

If you conduct business in any capacity in a digital environment, you may need bot detection software. It often comes down to noticing unusual behavior that doesn’t resemble human-like behavior in your website traffic. If you begin to notice sudden, unexplained spikes in visitors or notice a higher-than-usual number of failed logins or account registrations, your website may have bots accessing digital resourcesinfiltrating the server. Bots are also known to fill out forms repeatedly or scrape content from your site, which can negatively impact your site’s performance and data integrity.

These issues can open your business to plenty of risks by misrepresenting your website analytics, wasting ad spend, and making it harder to track real user engagement. All industries face challenges when it comes to bot activity, and understanding how bots can impact your sector is key to choosing the right detection tools.

While bot attacks pose a threat to all digital environments, their impact varies by industry. Different industries face unique challenges when it comes to bot activity, and understanding how bots can impact your specific sector is key to choosing the right detection tools. Here are the major industries impacted by bots:

• Retail and E-commerce: This industry is often a victim of inventory hoarding, price scraping, and fake account creation. With more than half of all attempted carding attacks going to retail and e-commerce sites, they are directly at risk of major revenue loss.
• Financial Services: Attack attempts in the financial services industry have grown by 130% in recent years. This industry is often at high risk of account takeovers, credential stuffing, and fraud because of direct access to sensitive and financial data.
• Travel and Hospitality: Bots looking to scrape fare data, hoard reservations, or attempt fraud during high-demand periods specifically target the travel and hospitality sector. This industry has reached an attempted attack rate of over 56%.
• Food Delivery and Service: Bots target loyalty programs and exploit order systems, posing a threat to customer satisfaction and operational costs.
• Media and Publishers: Bots manipulate traffic metrics, scrape premium content, and bypass paywalls, resulting in scraping attacks exceeding 16% of all attempted scraping attacks observed in 2024.
• Advertising Platforms: Harmful bots can drive fake impressions and clicks, which can lead to skewed campaign data and drained ad budgets.

All industries must implement accurate, real-time solutions that mitigate and block malicious bot attacks. Understanding how bots directly impact your industry creates better defenses to protect the digital environment for your organization.

HUMAN detects and mitigates sophisticated bot attacks for businesses with unparalleled speed, scale, and decision precision. Our solutions protect the entire digital customer journey across three critical surfaces:

• Advertising Protection detects and mitigates ad fraud pre- and post-bid to increase inventory transparency and ensure ads reach real humans across all channels.
• Application Protection defends against malicious bot attacks, including account takeover, scraping, transaction abuse and data contamination on web and mobile applications.
• Account Protection provides organizations with comprehensive account security to neutralize account takeover attacks (ATO), fake account abuse and compromised accounts before bad actors can exploit them.

What is account takeover?

What is credential stuffing? | Definition, attack types, & solutions

What is scraping? | Protection from web scraping & data scraping

What is bot traffic? | Block bad bots from attacks

What is bot detection? | How to detect & block bad bots

Can bots be detected?

Yes, bots can be detected using behavior-based indicators like rapid clicks, abnormal session durations, or repeated form submissions. Advanced tools also analyze IP reputation, user-agent data, and traffic patterns to distinguish bots from real users.

How do you spot bot traffic?

You can spot bot traffic by looking for unusual patterns like an increase in failed logins, high bounce rates, or activity from unusual locations. Server logs, analytics tools, and honeypots can also help flag suspicious behavior.

How does Google detect bots?

Google detects bots using a combination of user-agent analysis, IP filtering, and behavioral monitoring. It also uses strategies like CAPTCHAs and machine learning to identify and challenge suspicious activity.

Are botnets easy to track down?

No, botnets are not easy to track down. They are difficult to track because they use large, distributed networks of compromised devices. Fortunately, cybersecurity teams with advanced technology can analyze traffic patterns and share threat intelligence to detect and block botnet activity.