In contrast to Bot Mitigation, which is aimed at detecting and preventing attacks from malicious or ‘bad’ bots on websites, applications, and APIs, ‘Bot Management’ covers the entire spectrum of bots, both good and bad. Bot Management involves more than just mitigation of bad bots at all times and involves determination of which kind of good bots to allow at certain times to promote a better overall user experience and permit necessary organizational activities to be carried out when they need to be.
The intention is to allow good bots that are commonly used in large numbers for purposes such as website monitoring, search engine indexing, distribution of content to readers, as well as intercommunications between various partner and organizational systems that must work together as intended. For example, an online retail website could use third-party or partner services that use bots to provide information via chat to customers, query inventory databases to determine availability of a product, or shipping partners to provide timelines for delivery, to mention just a few uses of good bots.
Bot Management Solutions
Bot management solutions such as Radware Bot Manager are designed to allow good bots through without hindrance, except in cases of very high user traffic at certain times of the day during sales periods such as Cyber Week or other peak traffic periods (as determined by the website operator). In such cases, freely allowing search engine bots to visit large numbers of pages for indexing through peak traffic periods may cause shoppers to have a poor user experience due to web servers becoming slower than usual (which may then make shoppers abandon their purchases). The point of bot management is to allow good bots to carry out their beneficial functions, balancing their traffic with that of humans ─ and at times of high user traffic, slowing down the rate at which good bots can query web pages (so that the user experience is not affected).