What is a bot?

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A bot, short for "robot" or "web robot," is an automated software program designed to perform specific tasks on the internet without direct human intervention. Bots operate by following a set of predefined rules or algorithms to complete repetitive tasks, interact with websites, or analyze data at a much faster rate than a human user.

Bots can be classified into various types based on their functionality and purpose. Some common types of internet bots include:

1. Web crawlers or search engine bots: These bots are designed to systematically browse and index web pages, collecting and organizing information to be used by search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. By crawling and indexing websites, search engine bots enable users to find relevant content when performing online searches.
2. Data scraping bots: These bots extract information from websites and store it in a structured format for further analysis, research, or use in other applications. Data scraping bots are commonly used for price comparison, sentiment analysis, or competitive intelligence.
3. Social media bots: These bots automate various tasks on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. They can be used to automatically post content, like or share posts, follow or unfollow users, and even engage in conversations.
4. Spam bots: Spam bots are programmed to automatically post unwanted or unsolicited messages, advertisements, or links in comment sections, forums, and social media platforms. They can also be used to send spam emails to large numbers of recipients.
5. Malicious bots: These bots are designed to perform harmful actions, such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, infecting computers with malware, stealing sensitive information, or exploiting vulnerabilities in web applications.

Bots can be beneficial or harmful, depending on their intended purpose and how they are used. Good bots, like search engine crawlers and chatbots, improve the overall functionality and user experience of the internet. In contrast, bad bots, like spam bots and malicious bots, can cause harm to websites, users, and online infrastructure. Grey bots, such as backlink analysis and marketing bots, fall somewhere in between, providing valuable information and services but potentially causing problems if they crawl websites too aggressively or are misused.

To find out more about bots see the following articles:

What type of bots are there?
What malicious bot attacks are there?
What percentage of traffic is bots?
What is user-agent spoofing?
What is a CAPTCHA?
What is a javascript bot challenge?
What are AI/LLM web scrapers?
What is Bot Management?