Richard Kahn
Not all bots are malicious; some are helpful. Legitimate web crawlers help search engines index content, generate social previews, monitor uptime, and power SEO tools. But today, identifying “good bots” is not as simple as reading a user agent string. Google itself warns that crawler user agents are often spoofed, so businesses should verify important crawlers instead of trusting headers alone.
To manage bot traffic effectively:
- Identify and allow legitimate crawlers that support SEO and site functionality.
- Filter known bots out of analytics when appropriate.
Anura can assist with identifying and ignoring legitimate Crawlers while also protecting you from invalid bots and crawlers.
What Is Web Crawling?
A web crawler (sometimes called a spider or, more commonly, a bot) is an automated program that visits websites to collect information. Search engines such as Google and Bing use crawlers to discover content for their search indexes. Other crawlers may monitor website changes, archive pages, audit technical SEO, gather product data, or train specialized datasets.
Legitimate crawlers are commonly used for:
- search engine indexing
- backlink and SEO analysis
- social media link previews
- uptime monitoring
- ad verification
- AI search and retrieval
- model training in some cases
With that said, some crawlers are malicious or unwanted because they scan and collect information without benefiting the website owner. Not every unwanted crawler is necessarily malicious. For example, consider a price comparison crawler, which collects current prices and product availability for a comparison website. It isn’t necessarily trying to damage or compromise the store, but it still uses server resources and republishes data without permission, plus sends little or no referral traffic.
We’ll share more about the differences between good web crawlers and bad web crawlers below.
Good Bots vs Bad Bots
The difference between a good bot and a bad bot comes down to purpose, behavior, and authenticity.
Good bots
Good bots perform legitimate tasks that support the web. They may:
- index pages for search engines
- create preview cards for shared links
- check site uptime
- run approved ad verification
- collect SEO data for recognized tools
Bad bots
Bad bots are designed to exploit websites, ad campaigns, or data. They may:
- scrape content without permission
- commit click fraud
- submit fake leads or signups
- overload servers
- impersonate legitimate crawlers
- distort analytics and campaign attribution
Some malicious bots deliberately masquerade as known bots, so you’ll need more than a simple allowlist to manage them effectively.
Web Crawling vs Scraping: What’s the Difference?
Web crawling is primarily about discovering and navigating webpages, while web scraping is about extracting specific information from them.
For example, a search engine crawler visits a recipe site, follows links among its categories and recipes, and records the pages it finds. A scraper might visit those recipe pages and extract each recipe’s title, ingredients, preparation time, and rating into a spreadsheet.
Often, crawlers and scrapers work together. A crawler discovers relevant pages, then a scraper extracts the desired information from those pages.
Neither technique is inherently malicious. Whether its use is acceptable depends on factors such as authorization, website terms, privacy, copyright, access controls, and the amount of traffic generated. However, even if a web crawler isn’t malicious, that doesn’t mean you want it using the resources on your site.
Why Known Bots Matter
A known bot is an automated program whose identity and purpose are publicly documented or can be reliably verified. One common example is the Google web crawler, Googlebot. It visits webpages so Google can discover and index content for search results. Google publishes information about its user-agent strings and IP addresses, allowing website owners to verify that a request claiming to be Googlebot is genuine.
Known bots can be helpful, but they can also create noise.
If you do not account for them correctly, they can:
- inflate traffic reports
- muddy engagement metrics
- trigger false alarms
- distort your view of invalid traffic
- interfere with fraud analysis
For many organizations, the right move is not blocking every known bot. It is recognizing them properly and focusing fraud detection on the automation that should not be there in the first place.
That is the same reason Anura’s Common Bots and Crawlers feature exists for clients: to avoid misclassifying legitimate automated traffic as malicious when those bots are expected to be present.
Categories of Common Bots and Crawlers
1. Search Engine Crawlers
These are usually legitimate, but they can hit your site aggressively. For some businesses, they are useful. For others, they are just extra load.
Example: Googlebot
2. SEO and Marketing Crawlers
These are usually legitimate, but they can hit your site aggressively. For some businesses, they are useful. For others, they are just extra load.
Example: Semrushbot
3. Social Media Preview Bots
These bots generate the title, description, and image previews that appear when links are shared on social platforms and collaboration tools.
Example: facebookexternalhit
4. Monitoring and Uptime Bots
These bots check whether your website is online and responsive.
Example: Pingdom.com_bot
How to Protect Your Website from Bots
If you want to identify bots correctly, use more than one signal.
1. Allow Anura to Filter out Known Bots.
Start with the user agent string to look for known bot identifiers.
2. Use environmental detection to block Bad Bots
This is where advanced fraud platforms become useful. Use environmental detection such as Anura Script to block Bad Bots.
Environmental-based analysis helps distinguish:
- legitimate crawlers
- spoofed crawlers
- ad fraud bots
- residential proxy traffic
- sophisticated invalid traffic
Best Practices for Managing Good Bots
Allow what supports your business
Search crawlers, approved ad verification bots, preview bots, and uptime tools often support visibility and operations. Anura can allow good bots so that your business's essential bots are able to do their job.
Ignore expected bots where appropriate
Known bots should often be excluded from reporting, so your analysis reflects human and fraud-relevant traffic more accurately.
Monitor bot behavior over time
Bot ecosystems change quickly. AI retrieval traffic, preview bots, SEO bots, and spoofed crawlers all evolve.
Use advanced bot detection for everything else
If a bot is not clearly legitimate, or if it interacts like fraud, you need environmental detection that looks deeper than IP blocks and static signatures.
How Anura Fits In
Anura helps businesses separate expected automation from harmful invalid traffic so teams can:
- keep analytics cleaner
- avoid misclassifying legitimate crawlers
- stop malicious bot traffic
- better understand what traffic is hitting their web assets
For clients that expect certain non-malicious crawlers, Anura’s Common Bots and Crawlers functionality helps ignore those known bots appropriately, so teams get a cleaner view of invalid traffic and avoid interrupting legitimate automated checks.
Conclusion
Known bots are part of how the modern web works. Search engines rely on them, social platforms rely on them, uptime tools rely on them.
But not every bot that claims to be legitimate actually is.
That is why the smartest 2026 strategy is not “block all bots.” It is:
- identify known good bots
- verify important crawlers
- filter expected automation from analytics
- detect and stop malicious or spoofed bot traffic
That is how you protect performance without losing visibility, functionality, or clean data.
