The BOT Traffic Research Initiative

Discovering the impact of automated web traffic on eCommerce, customers and media

A joint research program between the University of Tartu Institute of Technology and BotGuard, the BOT Traffic Research Initiative studies the participant's website visitors and provides detailed analyses and information to improve their platform security and efficiency. Participation is free and entirely voluntary.

Bad traffic is a rapid-growing problem across the web

The growth of “bad traffic” is a risk for online stores as it can lead to big problems, like ad fraud, inventory denial, and credential cracking, just to name a few problems.

Brute-force Attacks

Bad bot attacks are usually the first step of a structured brute force attack towards your business.

Bigger Costs

Bot traffic increases your hosting bill. Hosting companies charge you based on your traffic and bot traffic consumes most of these resources.

Content Copycats

Your competitors may be scraping your website to copycat your content, improve their own SEO and gain an unfair advantage over you.

Increase your business security and efficiency for free

All businesses with eCommerce platforms are welcome to apply as this research project employs several novel detection techniques that are not yet available in most of the mainstream commercial products.

Be part of an innovative research and protect your business

The research project has three stages:

  1. Traffic Monitoring: participants will be provided access to the most recent BotGuard software to monitor their web traffic and receive instant in-depth analysis of their incoming traffic.
  2. Data Research: traffic data samples will be provided to the iCV Research Lab of the University of Tartu and shared with independent academic researchers worldwide.
  3. Final Report: All participants will have access to the research results and receive detailed stats from their own websites.

All data available to the researchers will be anonymized. Only you, the website owner, will have access to the full version of your data. And no need to worry that our actions will slow things down or lead to security vulnerabilities for your website; we will analyze a copy of your traffic data, and there will be no impact to the operation of your platform or security risk. The study will operate in full compliance with the EU's GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). If you have any questions about data security, contact the BotGuard Data Protection Officer at konstantin@botguard.net.