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WonderTechnology fact

More than half of all web traffic does not come from people. In 2024 automated programs, called bots, made 51% of all requests to websites, according to the security company Imperva, and about 37% came from harmful bots that copy data, try stolen passwords or look for weaknesses.

Imperva, Bad Bot Report, 2025

Technology

The story behind the card

A bot, short for robot, is a program that visits websites automatically. Many are useful. Search engines such as Google send out crawlers, also called spiders, that follow links from page to page and copy what they find so it can be searched. Other bots check that sites are online, compare prices or archive old pages. Harmful ones copy content without permission, try stolen passwords, snap up concert tickets or flood a site with requests to knock it offline. Since 1994 websites have been able to publish a file called robots.txt telling bots which pages to leave alone; it became an official internet standard in 2022, but it works only if a bot chooses to obey it. Imperva's 2025 report, which gave the 2024 figures, said automated traffic had overtaken human traffic for the first time in a decade, and that artificial intelligence is making simple bots easier to build.

Türkçe oku
Web trafiğinin yarısından fazlası insanlardan gelmez. Güvenlik şirketi Imperva'ya göre 2024'te web sitelerine gelen isteklerin %51'ini bot denen otomatik programlar yaptı; yaklaşık %37'si ise veri kopyalayan, çalınmış şifreleri deneyen ya da güvenlik açığı arayan zararlı botlardan geldi.
Imperva, Bad Bot Report, 2025

Bot, “robot” sözcüğünden gelir ve web sitelerini kendi kendine ziyaret eden bir programdır. Botların çoğu yararlıdır. Google gibi arama motorları, bağlantıları sayfa sayfa izleyip bulduklarını kopyalayan arama robotları, yani “örümcekler” gönderir; aramalar bu sayede sonuç verir. Başka botlar sitelerin çalışıp çalışmadığını denetler, fiyatları karşılaştırır ya da eski sayfaları arşivler. Zararlı olanlar ise içeriği izinsiz kopyalar, çalınmış şifreleri dener, konser biletlerini kapışır ya da bir siteyi isteklere boğarak çökertmeye çalışır. Siteler 1994'ten beri, botlara hangi sayfalara girmemeleri gerektiğini söyleyen robots.txt adlı bir dosya yayımlayabiliyor. Bu kural 2022'de resmî bir internet standardı oldu, ama yalnızca ona uymayı seçen botlar için işe yarar. Imperva'nın 2024 verilerini içeren 2025 raporuna göre otomatik trafik on yılda ilk kez insan trafiğini geçti; raporda yapay zekânın basit bot yapmayı kolaylaştırdığı da vurgulanıyor.

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Background reading: Internet bot
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