Bots now outnumber humans on the web

Bot traffic has surpassed humans this year, now accounting for 59 percent of all site visits, according to a report released today by Distil Networks.

By comparison, last year, bots accounted for 45 percent of all traffic to Distil’s customers’ websites.

The majority of the bot traffic was “good bots,” said Distil CEO Rami Essaid, such as that from search engines and social media sites. These bots comply with “robot.txt” files that Website administrators use to tell bots what to do, and bring value to the websites they visit.

He attributed the growth in bot traffic to more aggressive indexing by Bing, and by new search engines coming online.

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