Traffic that is not customers.
WHAT IT IS
Automated requests: search engine crawlers, scrapers, vulnerability scanners, spam bots.
THE SCALE
On many small sites, bot traffic exceeds human traffic.
Each request consumes resources exactly as a real visitor does.
HOW TO SEE IT
Raw access logs in cPanel, or a security plugin that reports it.
Compare requests against your analytics, which counts only humans.
The gap is bots.
WHAT IS LEGITIMATE
Search engine crawlers. You want those, in moderation.
WHAT IS NOT
Scrapers copying your content Scanners probing for vulnerabilities Spam bots targeting forms
WHAT TO DO
Caching, which serves bots a stored copy cheaply Blocking known bad agents Rate limiting A firewall or CDN filtering before requests reach your site
WHAT NOT TO DO
Block search engines by mistake. Check any blocking rule carefully.
