Not all bots are bad. Publishers and marketers need some bots to help catalog the mass of data on the internet, by crawling sites in the service of search engines. But bad bots cause major problems?and cost a lot of money. From web scraping to account hijacking to click fraud, bad bots can be big trouble.
According to Distil Networks, China is experiencing a lot of that trouble. Nearly 31% of the mobile web traffic examined by Distil in China was from bad bots. That was more than five times the level of bad bot traffic as in the US or the rest of the world.
Relatively few bad bots actually originate in China, however. The US takes the cake there, as the home to 52.2% of all bad bots in the world. Just 2.5% of bots come originally from China. India is the 10th-largest bad bot originator, and the only other country in the top 10 in Asia-Pacific, with 2.2% of bad bots starting there.
Distil’s report indicated that there is actually more good bot than bad bot traffic this year, at 36.3% vs. 22.8% of all web traffic examined. That leaves just 40.9% of web traffic to be made up by humans.
