In 2021, 27% of all the global website traffic was due to bad bots, up from 25.6% in 2020. The overall bot traffic (good+bad) on the internet was 42.3%, and the remaining 57.7% was human.

"Bad bots" are applications that run automated tasks with malicious intent. They scrape data from sites without permission to reuse it and gain a competitive edge (e.g. pricing, inventory levels, proprietary content). They are used for scalping, the act of obtaining limited availability items to resell at a higher price. The top three most common bot attacks in 2021 were Account Takeover, Scraping, and Scalping.

On the other hand, "Good Bots" are applications that make searches on the internet easier e.g search engine crawlers such as 'Googlebot' and 'Bingbot', through their indexing, help people match their queries with the most relevant sets of websites.

'Bad bot' traffic continues to increase on the internet. Moreover, evasive bad bots accounted for the majority of bad bot traffic (65.6%) in 2021. These bots can evade common defences on the computer. They use the latest evasion techniques, including cycling through random IPs, entering through anonymous proxies, changing their identities, mimicking human behaviour and delaying requests.

The U.S. was the most affected country in 2021 by bad bot attacks with 43% of all attacks, followed by Australia at 6.8% and the U.K. at 6.7%.