Incapsula (full disclosure: Incapsula is a subsidiary of Imperva) today released a great bit of research. They asked: "What is the overhead of all the automated bot traffic?" Today, most people think that a cost is incurred from bad bots only when a breach occurs. Not true if more than up to 80% of your total web traffic comes from machines. The automated traffic has a drag-like effect seen in aerodynamics. They write:
Most of this traffic is automated and is entirely unrelated to the website’s real human traffic. Basically, each website spun up by a hosting provider will suffer a set level of Bot traffic regardless of how many real visitors it attracts. We like to compare this to an analogous a phenomenon in aerodynamics known as parasitic drag, which occurs when moving a solid object through a gaseous medium – a common example is an airplane wing’s drag during flight.
What is the impact of parasitic drag?
Bots seriously degrade the user experience and performance of your website. Would-be customers abandon shopping carts or flee to a competitor when your website doesn’t perform.
Incapsula does provide recommendations that any website should carefully review.


