Bot prevention
methods used to prevent access by bots
Bot prevention refers to the methods used by web services to prevent access by automated processes.
Types of bots
Studies suggest that over half of the traffic on the internet is bot activity, of which over half is further classified as 'bad bots'.
Bots are used for various purposes online. Some bots are used passively for web scraping purposes, for example, to gather information from airlines about flight prices and destinations. Other bots, such as sneaker bots, help the bot operator acquire high-demand luxury goods; sometimes these are resold on the secondary market at higher prices, in what is commonly known as 'scalping'.
According to Imperva Bad Bot Report 2025, bad bots now making up 37% of all internet traffic.
Detection techniques and avoidance
Various fingerprinting and behavioural techniques are used to identify whether the client is a human user or a bot. In turn, bots use a range of techniques to avoid detection and appear like a human to the server.
Browser fingerprinting techniques are the most common component in anti-bot protection systems. Data is usually collected through client-side JavaScript which is then transmitted to the anti-bot service for analysis.
The public source identifies “Bot prevention” as methods used to prevent access by bots. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around prevention, methods and used.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q108444799. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2025.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bot prevention” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.