Glossary: Bot Traffic

Bot traffic refers to non-human visits generated by automated scripts, crawlers, or bad actors rather than real people. It can inflate traffic and engagement metrics, and in crypto apps, often overlaps with automated wallet activity used to farm incentives.

Examples

• A search engine crawler generates bot traffic that must be filtered from analytics reports.

• A spike in traffic around an airdrop announcement turns out to be largely bot traffic.

• A team compares gross traffic to bot-filtered traffic to get an accurate visitor count.

Bot traffic in crypto apps

Crypto apps attract more automation than most sites. Crawlers index docs and token pages, uptime monitors ping the app, scrapers copy price data, and scripts poll claim pages before an airdrop. Most of this traffic never connects a wallet. Onchain automation is a separate problem: trading bots, relayers and farming scripts send real transactions from real addresses, so they show up in wallet and volume metrics rather than in visitor counts.

Example

A project announces a points season and sees 12,000 visitors in a day. When the team breaks visitors down by device, 4,000 come from known crawlers and link preview bots. The human count is closer to 8,000, and the wallet count barely moves, because the bots never connected a wallet.

How Formo handles bot traffic

Formo identifies known crawlers and automated clients from their user agent and labels them with the device type Bots. Formo labels this traffic and does not delete it, so bots still count in Visitors, Sessions, Page views and Bounce rate. To see human traffic only, add a Device filter that excludes Bots. Bots rarely carry a wallet address, so they seldom reach wallet counts.

Related reading

Explore Bot Filtering, Adblocker, Sybil Wallet, and Unique Visitor.

FAQs

Is all bot traffic bad?

No. Some bot traffic, like search engine crawlers, is legitimate and even beneficial for discoverability.

How does bot traffic relate to Sybil wallets?

Both involve automated or fabricated activity (bot traffic on the web side, Sybil wallets on the onchain side), often used to farm incentive campaigns.

How is bot traffic identified?

Common signals include unusual request patterns, known bot user agents, and behavioral heuristics.

Does Formo remove bot traffic from reports?

No. Formo labels known crawlers and automated clients with the device type Bots and keeps them in the data. Add a Device filter that excludes Bots when you want a human-only view of Visitors, Sessions or Bounce rate.