Half the Web's traffic comes from bots, and that's costing you more than you think

Roughly half of all Web traffic comes from bots and crawlers, and that's costing companies a boatload of money. That's one finding from a report released Thursday by DeviceAtlas, which makes software to help companies detect the devices being used by visitors to their websites. Non-human sources accounted for 48 percent of traffic to the sites analyzed for DeviceAtlas's Q1 Mobile Web Intelligence Report, including legitimate search-engine crawlers as well as automated scrapers and bots generated by hackers, click fraudsters and spammers, the company said. DeviceAtlas is owned by Afilias, which calls itself the world's second-largest Internet domain name registry. Bot technologies have long been known to account for a significant amount of traffic, but today they're becoming more malevolent -- and more expensive, said Ronan Cremin, CTO of DotMobi, a mobile content delivery company also owned by Afilias.