Bots (or web robots) and web scrapers are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet. Bots are used for many purposes, from good bots that are beneficial (such as Google's bot) to bad bots that scrape web pages or participate in DDoS attacks.

Many bots play a legitimate role in an organization’s online business strategy. Others harm the business by reducing competitive advantage, getting between an organization and its customers, or committing fraud. Traditional bot mitigation tools typically only block bot traffic, affecting beneficial and harmful bots in the same manner – and prompting malicious bots to evolve and become even harder to detect.

Bot mitigation tools allow you to create categories of bots that reflect the specific impact that certain bots have on your business – whether it’s beneficial or damaging. Bot mitigation tools detect bot signatures in real time as they attempt to access your website. They apply different management policies (i.e. slow down access, redirect to alternate origin, serve stale data) to bot categories, as appropriate for your business. Bot mitigation tools rely on sophisticated big data technologies and therefore are not easy to build and maintain in-house.