🤖Bots: The good, the bad, & the ugly

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Long weekend coming up, folks. College football kicks off too. Hope you’ve got fun plans. 

Now. Today’s Feature Story lays out all the bots you need to know about. Good bots and bad ones. And how to deal with them. Even the worst of the worst bots.

After that story, chomp down on the following sections: 

• The Knowledge Base  

• Self Help (bad fit)  

• Facts & Stats (where ads work)

• Get Hacking (email summaries) 

Ok, let’s crack open today’s Feature Story…

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Feature Story

How Many Types of Bots Are Out There?

Bots make up roughly 51% of internet traffic. More bots than humans (source: Lunio).

There are too many types of bots to count. But I piled up a list of the main ones below. Good, bad, ugly.

I used to think the worst bots were ones costing business owners money through rampant click fraud. After a couple hours’ research for this post, there’s plenty of others causing real damage.

The Good Bots

(Good or bad depends on which side of the table you’re on with some of these)

Search Engine Crawlers are programs that visit your website to figure out what it's about. Google's Googlebot and Microsoft's Bingbot scan your site so it shows up when people search. 

SEO and Marketing Bots like AhrefsBot check how your website’s doing. They look at things like who links to your site and help you see what needs fixing to rank better in searches.

Monitoring Bots check your website to ensure it's running properly and tell you when something breaks or runs slow.

Content Aggregators collect information from lots of websites. News sites use them to gather stories for readers.

Email Sorting Bots organize your inbox automatically. 

Social Media Monitoring Bots track when people mention your brand, watch what competitors are doing, and spot trending topics. 

Price Scraping Bots check competitor prices, inventory, and sales to help retailers stay competitive. 

Gaming Resource Bots do repetitive game tasks like collecting items or leveling up characters while you're away. 

The Bad Bots

Content Scrapers steal your website content and use it somewhere else without asking. They copy your text and images for their own sites.

Spam Bots fill out your contact forms and leave comments with junk content. They create gobs of useless messages you gotta deal with.

Engagement Inflation Bots fake likes, comments, and shares to make content look more popular than it is.  

Influence Operation Bots spread false information and propaganda to change what people think. 

Review Manipulation Bots post fake reviews to make bad products look good or destroy good products' reputations with fake bad reviews.

Aimbots and Combat Bots cheat in video games by automatically targeting enemies or making perfect moves.  

Profile Boost Bots automatically swipe and message on dating apps to make users seem more popular than they are. So, the app’s algorithm makes these profiles more visible.

The Ugly Bots

Click Fraud Bots click on ads without wanting to buy anything. This wastes your advertising money since you pay for each click. Fake clicks are a nasty problem costing businesses billions!

Inventory Hoarding Bots instantly buy up limited items when they go on sale, then resell ’em at higher prices. 

Romance Scam Bots create fake dating profiles with stolen photos and scripted conversations to trick people into sending money.

DDoS Attack Bots flood your website with fake traffic to crash it. When this happens, real people can't visit your site.

Sounds like doomsday, so just give up. Kidding. Here are 3 main concerns and ways to battle the harmful bots…

3 Ways to Handle Bad Bots

#1 Bad bots make up about 37% of all website traffic, which means you're paying to host visitors that aren't real people. Your servers use more resources to handle bot requests, costing you money while serving attackers instead of customers. KaBuM! found one-third of their server capacity was being wasted on malicious bots.

How to Fix It:

• Use bot detection tools like Cloudflare to filter out bots before they hit your servers

• Set limits on how many requests can come from one source

• Use content delivery networks (CDNs) to block bot traffic automatically

#2 Click fraud bots click on your ads without any intent to buy anything. During busy shopping times like Black Friday, businesses lose an average of $2.58 million per hour to bot attacks. Fake online transactions jumped 138% in 2024, with over 34% of transactions flagged as fraudulent. Your advertising stops working when bots click your ads but never buy anything.

How to Fix It:

• Use click fraud detection tools like TrafficGuard or ClickCease

• Block suspicious IP addresses and high-risk traffic sources

• Monitor your ads to catch unusual patterns where lots of clicks don't lead to sales

• Use server-side tracking that bots can't manipulate

#3 Bots fill out your forms with fake information, mess up your website analytics, and force your team to waste time chasing fake customers. Your customer data becomes useless when 40% comes from bots pretending to be people.

How to Fix It:

• Protect forms with honeypots, smart CAPTCHAs, and AI detection

• Use tools that spot non-human behavior 

• Set up lead scoring to flag suspicious form submissions before they reach your sales team

• Use automated bot management systems that handle detection and blocking

3 Ways to Utilize Good Bots

#1 FAQs: Chatbots can answer routine questions, greet website visitors, and fix simple issues.

#2 Robotic Process Automation (RPA): Bots can do your repetitive work. Data entry, invoice handling, form completion, transferring information between systems, and updating records.

#3 Marketing: Bots sort, score, and segment leads, monitor incoming emails for business opportunities, and send follow-ups based on customer behavior. They can automate drip campaigns, schedule social media posts, and analyze campaign results to improve strategies.

The Bottom Line

Hope that opens your eyes to all the different bots and their uses.

(BTW, I didn’t even have time to talk about BaaS (Bots as a Service) or the new attacks on APIs that bots are using more frequently.)

Seems clear that to survive bad bots, we have to utilize good bots. 

And that’s a solid reason to read up on AI and automation and play around with various tools. Stay away from AI hype and fear-mongering, if you can, though. 

Time to slide into The Knowledge Base, starting with why crooks like hacking loyalty programs more than credit cards.

Self-Help

I bet I’ve read 10 different goal-setting books over the years. By brilliant leaders, such as Jim Rohn. 

None of them helped much. Maybe bits and pieces did. But I never felt like I accomplished the goals I wrote down. 

Instead, I should’ve read about picking a goal-setting plan that fit me specifically. Maybe that would’ve produced better results. 

Maybe that’s where personality or personal strength tests come in handy?

Facts & Stats

Bonus: Employment for younger workers (ages 22–25) in AI-impacted jobs has dropped by ___% since late 2022. Answer at end of email.

Get Hacking

A specific strategy to implement today

Friday’s edition of Inbox Hacking will dig into the new problem of AI email summaries.

This is gonna make life harder for email marketers. 

One way to combat it is to write two versions of every email campaign. Test both to see which is better when it gets summarized by AI (either automatically or by the human reader asking AI to do it).

You’re thinking you barely have time to write one email, much less two! That’s what your little robot (AI) is for. You be the OG writer. Let the bone-headed bot rework it. 

That’s a solid use of AI. And a good way to not have your emails derailed by AI summaries that leave out the meat of your emails. 

Another smart move is to get AI to summarize emails in your inbox. To get a feel for what those summaries look like.

More details on this problem in Friday’s Inbox Hacking.

Thanks for reading Inbox Hacking. Please share it with your peeps - it’s sugar-free but stings a bit.

Shane McLendon - Copy Kingpin

P.S. Labor Day sales mean website traffic goes up. If your traffic rises, it’s the perfect time to collect leads. Why ignore shoppers who show interest in your offers? Identify these interested shoppers with Smart Recognition. No better time to demo the tool than during Labor Day traffic spikes. Book a demo.

Bonus answer from Facts & Stats section: Stanford researchers found employment for younger workers (ages 22–25) in AI-impacted jobs — like software development and customer support — has dropped by 16% since late 2022 (Axios).

“If you are always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be.” ~Maya Angelou