Why Legitimate Bot Traffic Is a Growing Security Blind Spot

Security teams have spent years improving their ability to detect and block malicious bots. That effort remains critical. Automated traffic now makes up more than half of all web traffic, and bot-driven attacks continue to grow in volume and sophistication. What has changed is the role of legitimate bots and how little visibility most security teams have into their behavior.

So-called good bots now account for a significant share of automated traffic. Search engine crawlers index content. AI systems scrape pages to train models and generate responses. Agentic AI is beginning to interact with applications on behalf of users. These bots often operate within accepted norms, but at a scale that introduces real security, performance, and cost implications.

The risk is not always malicious intent. It is uncertainty. Legitimate bots expand the attack surface by continuously interacting with web applications, APIs, and content repositories. They touch endpoints that may not ...