Bot types and intents
Bots can have different types and intents. A bot function depends on the intent. Bots can be classified by their intent, such as beneficial, undesirable, and harmful.
In this article you can learn more about the different bot types and examples of how they can impact your Shopify store.
Understanding bot intents
Understanding the intent behind each automated action helps Shopify to categorize and assess the impact of the varying activities, as well as to manage them effectively to protect and enhance Shopify.
Intent is the underlying purpose or objective that drives automated traffic. Depending on the intent, you can determine whether an automated activity is beneficial, undesirable, or harmful.Understanding the intent behind automated activities can have the following benefits:
- Enhance strategy: By identifying and understanding various intents, you can develop strategic measures to protect, ensuring alignment with your business goals and values.
- Optimize performance: Recognizing beneficial intents helps support and enhance positive automation, improving overall efficiency.
- Facilitate communication: Establishing a shared language and clear definitions around intents allows better communication between you and your customers.
Categories of bot intents
Review the following table to learn more about the different categories of bot intents.
| Bot's intent | Description |
|---|---|
| Beneficial | Automated activities that provide value. These bots enhance functionality, improve user experience, and contribute positively to store operations. |
| Undesirable | These bots neither significantly benefit nor harm the platform, though some don't directly contribute to your buisness objectives, they don't pose an immediate threat. |
| Harmful | These bots pose risks to security, performance, or reputation. These activities require immediate attention and mitigation. |
Beneficial bots
Beneficial bots have legitimate business functions, such as SEO indexers that help maintain your store's visibility on search engines, or accessibility tools used by customers with disabilities, to navigate a storefront. Review the following table to learn more about beneficial bot types and their impact.
| Beneficial bot example | Description |
|---|---|
| SEO indexer bot | Crawls a website to ensure its ranking and listing on search engines are up to date. |
| Customers and accessibility bot | Signs up for a customer account, browses your store, adds product to a cart, checkouts a product, browses a webpage using accessibility tools, or buys a product using accessibility tool. |
| Automated authorized integrations bot | Setups apps to manage a merchants store. |
Undesirable bots
Undesirable bots have neutral or mixed intentions, such as unauthorized load tests that strain Shopify's infrastructure or unknown scrapers that gather data without permission. Review the following table to learn more about undesirable bot types and their impact.
| Undesirable bot example | Description |
|---|---|
| Unauthorized load tests bot | Ensures Shopify can handle a stores traffic without prior warning. |
| Automated merchant signup creation bot | Strains infrastructure, damages reputation, or spams users with Shopify emails |
| Unknown scraper bot | Gathers data, automates tasks, access gated content, duplicates content issues, confuses search engines, or perfoms click fraud. |
| Form and blog spam bot | Performs SEO backlinking for better ranking, affects SEO negatively to hurt established website ranking, diminshes merchant's Google trust rating, or harasses merchants. |
| Restock bot | Scrapes inventory information, automatically purchases products upon restock, searchs for live web URLs that haven’t yet been made public (footprinting), and denies inventory. |
| Checkout bot | Automatically purchases products and inflates checkout queue time |
Harmful bots
Harmful bots have malicious intentions, such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that disrupt normal operations, or bots that are involved in financial fraud and data exfiltration. Review the following table to learn more about hamrful bot types and their impact.
| Harmful bot example | Description |
|---|---|
| Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) bot | Maliciously disrupts the normal functioning of Shop or Shopify. Attackers attempt to overwhelm Shopify's infrastructure, by sending a large amount of web requests over a short period of time, leveraging a distributed system. A distributed system is used to increase the difficulty of automatic detection and blocking of this attack. |
| Private data exfiltration bot | Transfers private data out of your organization or transfers customers private data |
| Automated customer signup creation bot | Degrades domain and email reputation, makes marketing efforts difficult and impact Return On Ad Spend (ROAS), degrades a store's reputation by sending emails to customers that didn't sign up for, automatically buys products, or peforms click fraud. |
| Financial fraud bot | Creates fraudulent orders to get free products, tests cards to determine whether card details are valid, or issues chargebacks to hurt a business. |
| Counterfeit scraper bot | Scrapes a website to clone content, negatively attacks SEO, or impersonates a store to make money. |