Bots and security
Recognizing fraudulent activity within your digital products can help safeguard your business. Identify the non-human crawlers, bots, and spam traffic with device detection.
Use 51Degrees for bot detectionWhat is a web crawler?
Website crawlers, also known as bots or spiders, are automated programs that perform certain tasks such as crawling the web.
They can be used for innocent or nefarious purposes. A search engine bot like Googlebot or Bingbot crawls the web for new webpages to index. However, fraudsters and hackers can use bots to scrape web content and gather large amounts of data.
To detect bot activity, you can use the User-Agent HTTP header. Our dedicated Data team regularly monitors the web for bots to add to our crawler database.
Take the hassle away from identifying bot traffic by using 51Degrees.
What about filtering unknown bots?
Sometimes, bad bots masquerade as an unusual device, or use a very old browser. Using certain combinations of 51Degrees properties, you can create a bot filter tailored to your audience.
How to filter bots from your analytics platform with User-Agent data
Use bot identification to:
Real-time location data can find fraudsters located in peculiar places. Device detection can spot unfamiliar devices trying to log onto your user’s accounts. Shine a light on questionable behavior patterns.
Bot traffic to your website can significantly increase your infrastructure and bandwidth costs. If you fall victim to spam bots and hackers, the costs can be huge. Detect crawlers quickly before they can get through the door to your website.
Too much bot traffic can reduce the performance of your website. And if your website has adverts, you could be wasting money on fake clicks. Improve your user experience by prioritizing humans over the bots.
Understanding how your audience interacts with your website is crucial for optimization, analysis, and strategy planning. But if most of your web traffic is automated crawlers, you’re not getting a clear, realistic picture of your audience. Easily segment the non-human traffic from the real people with crawler identification.
How to start using 51Degrees
Accurate device detection for bot identification
To start identifying bot traffic, you will need our IsCrawler property. Our CrawlerName property can provide additional information on the crawler.
51Degrees has different deployment methods, including cloud and on-premise. For cloud, you will need to create a Resource Key with your desired properties from our Cloud Configurator. After creating your Resource Key, we will provide you with code to implement.
We have documentation for each API language to get you started with on-premise device detection.
You can access a free 30-day trial by contacting us for more information.
What makes 51Degrees stand out from the crowd?
- Our free trial gives you access to all the data, so you can make an informed decision.
- Various deployment options in a range of API languages, all provided open-source and free via GitHub.
- We’re an ISO 9001 and 27001 certified company, so you can trust in our high-quality service.
- Our Data team update our device database of 3,002,817 combinations daily. We source our data from real devices, vendors, or optional usage sharing. We don’t cut corners by scraping the web.