Study: 31% of your website traffic is non-human, potentially malicious

Over half (51%) of Internet traffic is generated by non-human sources, found Incapsula.

Their study of 1,000 websites found that 31% of that non-human traffic can be dangerous to a business. It includes damaging intruders such as bots that steal data such as customer credit card information and email addresses or crash websites.

In effect this traffic is ‘hidden’ as it goes unreported in analytics solutions.

“Website owners who think they know who is visiting their sites should think again. Anyone who relies on Google analytics to view site traffic is simply blind to a significant amount of business-damaging visitors,” said Marc Gaffan, co-founder of Incapsula.

Incapsula has broken down website traffic into human and non-human forms:-

– 49% is human;

– 51% is non-human consisting of:

20% search engine and other good bot traffic

31% damaging intruders including spies (19%), scrapers (5%), hacking tools (5%) and comment spammers (2%).