61 pc of web traffic generated by bots: Research

London: Nearly 61.5 percent of all website traffic is now generated by bots, a new research has found. The study by security firm Incapsula said that was a 21 percent rise on last year`s figure of 51 percent.

According to the BBC, some of these automated software tools are malicious, stealing data or posting ads for scams in comment sections. But the firm said the biggest growth in traffic was for `good` bots. The report said that bots are tools used by search engines to crawl websites in order to index their content. Analytics companies use them to provide feedback about how a site is performing, and by others to carry out other specific tasks - such as helping the Internet Archive preserve content before it is deleted, the report said. To generate its report, Incapsula said it observed 1.45 billion bot visits over a 90-day period. The information was sourced from 20,000 sites operated by its clients. Dr Ian Brown, associate director at Oxford University`s Cyber Security Centre said the figures were useful as it indicated the growth in non-human traffic.