The process of identifying and filtering non-human traffic (crawlers, scrapers, click bots) from your link analytics. Industry data suggests 40-50% of all web traffic comes from bots.
Bot detection is critical for affiliate marketers because bot clicks inflate your analytics, waste ad spend, lower your conversion rate, and can get your account flagged by affiliate networks for low-quality traffic.
Not all bots are malicious. Search engine crawlers (Googlebot, Bingbot) are "good" bots that index content. The bots you want to detect and block are click bots, scrapers, and fraud bots that generate fake clicks.
| Method | How It Works | Effectiveness |
|---|---|---|
| User-Agent matching | Checks against 40+ known bot signatures | High for known bots |
| Click velocity | Flags IPs with >5 clicks in 60 seconds | High for simple bots |
| IP reputation | Cross-references against known bot IP databases | Medium-high |
| Header analysis | Checks for missing or inconsistent browser headers | Medium |
| Behavioral analysis | Detects non-human browsing patterns | High for sophisticated bots |
GeoRedir's bot detection runs at the edge (Cloudflare Workers) and checks every click against 40+ known bot User-Agent patterns. When block_bots=true is enabled on a smart link, detected bots are blocked before they reach the destination. Click velocity detection flags IPs making more than 5 requests in 60 seconds. All detections are logged in the traffic quality dashboard. See the Click Fraud Protection Guide for full setup.
GeoRedir detects and blocks bots at the edge before they inflate your analytics or waste ad spend.
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