Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the cloud company that powers and protects life online, today released a new State of the Internet (SOTI) report that details the security and business threats that organizations face with the proliferation of web scraping bots. Scraping Away Your Bottom Line: How Web Scrapers Impact Ecommerce finds that bots compose 42% of overall web traffic, and 65% of these bots are malicious.

With its reliance on revenue-generating web applications, the ecommerce sector has been most affected by high-risk bot traffic. Although some bots are beneficial to business, web scraper bots are being used for competitive intelligence and espionage, inventory hoarding, imposter site creation, and other schemes that have a negative impact on both the bottom line and the customer experience. There are no existing laws that prohibit the use of scraper bots, and they are hard to detect due to the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) botnets, but there are some things companies can do to mitigate them.