dark proxyscrape logo

Traffic Bot? – The Ultimate Guide 2024

Guides, Aug-03-20225 mins read
A traffic bot is a bot that shoots up your web traffic rate with machine-generated, fake traffic. SEO, Inc. says that, out of all the traffic generated in the year 2022, only 53% of the website visits are organic. The success rate of businesses is highly dependent on web traffic. There are bots that can rapidly generate traffic and fake popularity to websites. This article will discuss more on the functionality of traffic bots along with a list of the best traffic bots. 

Table of Contents

What Are Traffic Bots?

Traffic bots are software or application bots that create non-human traffic on a website. These bots generate fake traffic that seems to be as realistic as human traffic. Usually, bots are capable of repeating tasks time and again, which humans cannot do. In the same way, traffic bots generate a high number of views for every passing second to increase the possibility of being ranked on the top Search Engine Results Pages. 

Traffic Bots in Business

The first step to marketing a product or service is establishing the product among the public. Business owners may excel in all other business plans, like production, work process, and delivery. But, what if they are unknown in the market? We use digital forums to widen our businesses these days. The human interaction rate and visit counts on websites are highly positioned to decide the standard and popularity of a product. 

The number of times the general public visits a website is known as human traffic. The human traffic rate is directly proportional to the standards of the business. This traffic increases the chance of being listed on the top search results of the customer query.

As it is hard to reach high human traffic, some business marketers use traffic bots that generate non-human traffic that seems to be real human traffic. 

Traffic Bots for Click Frauds

Click fraud is another popular application of traffic bots. Some websites display advertisements for other products and charge them for each click. To earn more, the host websites make use of traffic bots that fake click counts on advertisements so they can make more money. This results in pay-per-click fraud. Pay-per-click is the amount the website charges for each click on its advertisement. 

Uses of Traffic Bots

Automatic traffic generation bots can serve both good and bad purposes. They can help people who use this auto-generated traffic for research, load testing, and promotions. There are also cases where this technology can collapse or disturb the process through auto-generated spam. 

  • The traffic bots are capable of creating traffic from specific locations upon request. These traffic bots use the IP addresses of desired areas using proxy servers. 
  • The Internet Service Providers and the digital network can’t easily spot these as non-human traffic unless they have a powerful tracking system. 
  • The traffic from the bot can help researchers as they can try out user testing. 
  • Testers use traffic bots to generate non-human traffic to perform load and stress testing. 
  • They can improve search engine ranks through fake human traffic, which can highly attract people to their sites.

Bot Traffic and Traffic Bots

Both bot traffic and traffic bots may seem like the same thing, but there are enough differences between them. Bot traffic refers to the automated traffic created by bots, whereas traffic bots denote the bots that generate traffic and increase the search result ranking of the website. To be precise, the former is the work done in the process of traffic generation and the latter is the creator that does the work. 

Proxies in Traffic Generation

Integrating proxies with bots is a part of traffic generation. Though users didn’t get proxy servers or web proxies to create traffic, the bots will implement a suitable one to work with traffic generation. The primary function of traffic bots is to create fake traffic. To make them appear like actual human visits, they have to go using IP addresses of various cities. Here, the proxy comes into the picture by providing IP addresses and repeating the process with multiple and different IP addresses. Some business sites use rotating residential proxies to change the IP address for each request. This process assigns a new IP address from the rotating IP pool. 

Top 3 Bots and Proxies

ProxyScrape

ProxyScrape is a residential proxy that provides a pool of IP addresses that work with different IP addresses.  ProxyScrape is one of the most affordable proxies for traffic bots compared to others. Though they are cheap, they don’t compromise on the quality. These proxies are capable of handling complex problems and help to create heavy traffic. ProxyScrape mostly provides rotating residential proxies, where the IP addresses rotate and each request works with a new IP address. This rotating IP allocation is an automatic process. They also provide specific session proxies, where the IP address will remain the same for the session and then move on to a new one.
Features
  • The IP pool has more than 7 million IP addresses. 
  • ProxyScrape provides high-level security.
  • This proxy is capable of handling complex and heavy load transactions.
  • ProxyScrape provides unlimited concurrency.
  • Their cost starts at 24 dollars per month. 

UPSEO

UPSEO is one of the best traffic-generating bots out there. This bot improves the ranking of our business in the search engine. It allows the use of IP addresses of up to 43 countries. This traffic bot is one of the few bots that especially works for SEO. They also prevent business sites from Google Analytics. The price depends on the number of visits per month. 

Features
  • UpSEO works to improve the SEO score and market the business.
  • It uses unique IP addresses for each visit and maintains the same IP address for the revisit. 
  • They cost 19 dollars for 2000 visits per month. 

Smart Proxy

Smart proxies provide quality service despite their moderate cost. They serve more than 190 countries in the world. The traffic bots can use the IP addresses of any country. This access to multiple countries’ IP addresses makes the business look like a world-familiar company in the market. 

Features:
  • Low possibility of being blocked by social sites as they provide a secure and quality proxy service.
  • They provide an IP pool that contains 10 Million IP addresses. The IP addresses vary with the areas, and protocol types, like HyperText, Transfer Protocol, and WebSockets.
  • The price depends on the desired level of bandwidth. 
  • They provide multiple bandwidth levels that start with 5 GB, which costs $75 per month. 

Challenges

  • Customers and social networks may suspect the unusual traffic rate and try to track the source. 
  • The bot-generated, fake traffic cannot escape tools like Google Analytics, which are highly secured to prevent non-human traffic.
  • Some traffic bots instead of only hiking the website visits, also generate many malicious and spam-filled messages to steal information from the system. 

How to Detect Fake Traffic

Identifying inorganic traffic is quite a challenging task. Here are some of the metrics with which you can analyze if the traffic is organic or not. 

Track the Source

Backtrack the source of the traffic. If a website is receiving more traffic from the same IP address, then there are possibilities for them to be bot traffic.  But most of the inorganic traffic comes from a proxy address so it can be hard to track the actual source. 

Measure the Bounce Rates

This metric defines the rate of visitors who leave the page without going further. As the main focus of bots will be to generate a huge amount of traffic in small time, they usually log in, visit, and log out in seconds. They will not focus on the time they stay on the site or the actions performed. The traffic with lower session duration and higher bounce rate have a higher chance of being bot-generated traffic. 

Notice a Huge Spike in Traffic

A sudden increase in traffic is suspicious. Analyze the web traffic chart and find if there are any spikes in traffic rate. If there is no reason for the rapid changes, this abnormal traffic can be bad traffic from the bots. 

Traffic Beyond Target Location

Businesses usually target people in certain locations to sell their products or services. They choose the locations based on an analysis of where their service works best. In this case, receiving traffic from irrelevant locations may be a sign of bad traffic. 

FAQs

1. Are traffic bots legal?

Yes. Traffic bots are legal as long as people use them for good reasons. Traffic generation helps in data analytics, research, and testing processes in a good way. But when they are used in the wrong way, such as stealing confidential details or abnormal traffic creation to increase popularity, it is considered a bad practice that is not legal.

2. Do traffic bots include proxies for traffic generation?

Traffic bots will seek the help of proxies in creating profile visits from different IP addresses and multiple locations.

3. How can you identify bot-generated traffic

Bots are capable of doing what humans cannot. This quality of the bots will differentiate the human visits from bot visits as bots will bring some abnormal hikes in the visitor’s count and interaction rate. 

Summary

Just like every invention and technological development comes with both good and bad sides, traffic bots are anything different. Artificial, human-like website visits can benefit the business by helping it grow in the eyes of the people while also helping to devise business strategies using automated traffic for testing. It is our responsibility to make use of such technologies in an ethical way.