What is bot traffic in advertising?
Bot traffic is ad activity generated by software rather than people: automated programs that load pages, request ads, watch videos, click or install apps. Some bots are benign, like search crawlers, and should simply be excluded from billing. Fraudulent bots are designed to mimic human behavior so that publishers, resellers or fraudsters get paid for fake impressions and clicks.
Bot traffic ranges from crude to sophisticated. Simple bots run from cloud servers, announce themselves in the user agent or appear on the IAB/ABC Spiders & Bots List; they count as GIVT. Sophisticated bots run in headless browsers, rotate through residential proxy IPs, fake mouse movement and even hold cookies to look like returning visitors; they are SIVT. Some live on malware-infected home devices as part of a botnet, so the traffic genuinely comes from a household.
Detection combines network signals (data-center IP ranges, proxy fingerprints), device signals (device fingerprinting inconsistencies) and behavior (impossibly regular timing, no scrolling, too many sessions per device).