There's a lot of data here to digest, but one thing that stood out to me is:
> Bot traffic: 41% of total
So of all the traffic that CF sees, it attributes 41% of it to automated bots. This is way higher than I would have guessed!
> Bot traffic: 41% of total
So of all the traffic that CF sees, it attributes 41% of it to automated bots. This is way higher than I would have guessed!
Bear in mind that that's what CF attributes to bots. As a human who gets flagged as a bot sometimes, I'm a little skeptical of their numbers.
Pro-tip in Google Analytics you can filter by some device color depth = 0 bits and find (what I assume) are all bots that way.
But keep in mind CF has a lot of options for filtering traffic. Just because you got a CAPTCHA on a CF site doesn't necessarily mean considered you a bot.
What else it thinks I am?
edit: replaced "scrapes" with "crawls" for accuracy.
The Earth has a (mostly) free society. Therefore, many programmers find a web crawler to be an advantageous endeavor. From search engines, to social media companies, to ad networks, to government agencies, to financial institutions, to students learning about programming, to nefarious actors, and even shadow versions of everything above. Bots are neat. One can do a lot with a freely accessible public database of information, only limit is one's creativity.
(edited: for formatting)
On the consumer side. There is a hard limit on bandwidth, though, on the provider side that can be exhausted by an overwhelming amount of bot traffic. In effect, that's what a DDoS is, even if unintentional.
eg if mobile traffic is 35% of total, what percentage of legit vs bot traffic is mobile? TLS 1.2 vs 1.3 is a 38%/61% split, but how much bot traffic is encrypted?