What is Bot Management?
The practice of detecting, classifying, and controlling automated traffic on a website.
Bot management encompasses the strategies and tools used to identify, classify, and respond to automated traffic visiting a website. Good bot management distinguishes between beneficial bots (search crawlers, monitoring), neutral bots (SEO tools), and harmful bots (scrapers, attackers).
Traditional bot management focused on blocking bad bots with CAPTCHAs, rate limiting, and IP blacklists. Modern bot management is more nuanced: AI training crawlers aren't "bad" per se, but you may want to control their access. AI assistant crawlers are beneficial but need different treatment than search crawlers. Browser agents require behavioral detection since they look like humans.
The AI era has made bot management significantly more complex. Instead of a binary allow/block decision, site owners now need granular policies for dozens of different agent types, each with different purposes, behaviors, and business implications.
How Switch Helps
Switch provides bot management specifically designed for the AI era — detecting 45+ agent types and providing journey workflows for granular, purpose-specific responses.
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