How much of my store's traffic is actually bots?
Why dashboards undercount bots
Platform analytics count sessions, not intent. A bot that executes JavaScript, accepts cookies, and rotates residential IPs looks like a mobile shopper to most dashboards. The gap shows up later as retargeting audiences full of dead devices, ad spend optimized toward scrapers, and conversion rates that never match what traffic growth promised.
The four bot categories hitting stores
Content scrapers copy pricing and catalog data for competitors and republishers. Carding bots test stolen card numbers through your checkout. Inventory bots watch and hoard limited drops. Account bots mass-register to farm coupons and referral credit. Each category leaves a different fingerprint in your logs, which is why a single rule never catches all four.
How to measure your real bot share
Sample at least a week of traffic across product pages, cart, checkout, and signup. Score every request on behavior - timing, navigation order, fingerprint consistency - not just IP reputation. The resulting split between human and automated traffic is the baseline every protection decision should start from. A free bot-traffic audit produces exactly this baseline without touching your stack.