6 min read
Stopping Affiliate Fraud in 2026: A Practical Guide for Brands
TL;DR:
- Affiliate fraud is costing brands billions annually and undermining performance-based marketing results.
- ...
Bot traffic affects websites of all sizes, and the best defense is advanced bot protection software. Combat bot fraud and safeguard your ad spend from harmful activity.
Automated threats can work around the clock to skew analytics and steal your sensitive information. The best bot prevention solutions ensure only genuine users and customers can interact with your services. It’s time to start defending against these attacks and safeguard the integrity of your digital assets.
A bot, short for "robot", is a type of software application that runs automated tasks over the internet. Bots can perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone.
Bots can vary in their level of complexity and their functions. They can range from performing simple tasks like web scraping, managing, and organizing data, or interacting with users in customer service or social media platforms, to much more complex tasks like participating in online video games, predicting stock market trends, or even simulating human conversation, as is the case with AI chatbots.
People create malicious bots to achieve nefarious purposes such as stealing information, spamming users, spreading misinformation, or conducting cyber-attacks for financial gain or disruption.
Not all bots are created equal.
There are good bots, but there are also numerous types of malicious bots engineered to perform specific harmful tasks. You need comprehensive bot protection for your website from both basic and sophisticated bots.

Bots have the capability to click on your ads, leading to click fraud. These fraudulent clicks inflate your click-through rates (CTR), drain your advertising budget, and divert your ads from genuine audiences, rendering your campaigns ineffective

Sophisticated bots mimic the behavior of a human user. They will typically use a real IP address and browser, and they will enter valid contact information. However, they will often use real data, and they will not be interested in your products or services. These leads will never convert to real sales, skewing your conversion statistics and risking noncompliance with regulations such as TCPA.

Social media bots are automated programs that mimic human interactions on social media platforms. They can like, share, comment, and even create posts. While some social bots are beneficial, like customer service chatbots, others can be detrimental to the digital space, engaging in spamming, spreading misinformation, and skewing analytics.

Zombie bots turn computers into mindless drones, letting hackers control them remotely without visitors knowing their machine’s been compromised.
These botnets can execute Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, overwhelming and crashing your website

These bots are used to scrape website content, such as product listings or pricing information. This can be used for malicious purposes, such as price gouging or data theft.

Bots are automated programs that can crawl websites and collect data. They can be used for legitimate purposes, such as search engine indexing, but they can also be used for malicious purposes, such as spam and click fraud.
Are you noticing high traffic, unusual user behavior, or an increase in spam? You might have a bot problem.
An unexpected surge in traffic could be a sign of bot activity. This could be general traffic or specific to certain pages or assets.
Bots often access a page and leave quickly, causing an increase in bounce rate.
Bots might exhibit behavior that is different from typical visitor behavior, such as accessing a website at unusual times, making repetitive actions, or navigating the website in an illogical manner.
An increase in spam comments or messages can be a sign of bot activity.
A sudden slowdown in website performance or unexplained server overload could be a sign that bots are flooding your site with requests.
A sudden surge in new account creation, especially with suspicious or nonsensical information, can be a sign of bots.
Multiple failed login attempts could be a bot trying to gain unauthorized access.
It's time to protect your site from bots! Anura's robust anti-bot protection solution ensures a safer, smoother online experience.
Bots can wreak havoc beyond just impacting your bottom line. When malicious bots infiltrate your systems, they can slow down your website, cause service disruptions, and manipulate site traffic. Once inside your system, they can also work around the clock to steal sensitive information and cause a data breach.
Bots steal sensitive information, use it to spam other websites, or sell it to competitors.
Some bots are even advanced enough to harvest your customers’ financial data, including credit card numbers and social security numbers.
Bots can also trick you into activating electronic bank transfers, liking social media pages without your permission, downloading malware, or even making online purchases.
Customers facing sluggish performance or security concerns are likely to seek alternatives. This negatively impacts the user experience and results in lost engagement.
Anura is your frontline defense against the disruptive influence of unwanted bots. Our technology doesn't just identify bot activity, it offers superior bot prevention to stop bots from submitting forms, and skewing your metrics.
Protect your website from bots with Anura.
Our advanced algorithms in our bot detection software can detect even the most subtle signs of bot activity, helping you identify and stop harmful bots in their tracks.
We track the unique characteristics of each device that visits your website or app to identify bots that are using fake or stolen devices.
Our solution is highly accurate, so you can be confident that you are only blocking bots and not legitimate visitors.
Our solution is easy to deploy and can be customized to meet the specific needs of your business. We offer a free trial so you can see how our solution can work for you.
Our solution detects bots in real time, so you can take action to block them before they cause any damage.
We employ deep learning techniques to continually evolve our defenses, staying one step ahead of malicious bot developers.
Once detected, Anura swiftly neutralizes bot threats, keeping your online environment secure and performing optimally.
Bots don’t rest, and neither do we. Anura provides round-the-clock protection for your digital assets.
Our advanced algorithms can detect even the most subtle signs of bot activity, helping you identify and stop harmful bots in their tracks.
We track the unique characteristics of each device that visits your website or app to identify bots that are using fake or stolen devices.
Our solution is highly accurate, so you can be confident that you are only blocking bots and not legitimate visitors.
Our solution is easy to deploy and can be customized to meet the specific needs of your business. We offer a free trial so you can see how our solution can work for you.
Our solution detects bots in real time, so you can take action to block them before they cause any damage.
We employ deep learning techniques to continually evolve our defenses, staying one step ahead of malicious bot developers.
Once detected, Anura swiftly neutralizes bot threats, keeping your online environment secure and performing optimally.
Bots don’t rest, and neither do we. Anura provides round-the-clock protection for your digital assets.
My team and I have been working with Anura help with panel quality and botting, they've been an outstanding solution to our anti-fraud needs!
— Anand L.
Jan 14, 2026
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Here are some frequently asked questions.
A bot is an automated program designed to perform tasks online—sometimes helpful, sometimes harmful. In gaming, bots can farm resources or automate actions to gain unfair advantages.
There are many different types of bots: Playing bots and artificial bots mimic human behavior across websites, ads, and social platforms, often generating fake traffic or fraudulent engagement. Counter bots are defensive tools that detect and block these malicious bots to protect data accuracy and marketing spend. More dangerous forms, like zombie bots, hijack devices without users knowing and can join large botnets used for attacks such as DDoS.
Bots can engage in various fraudulent activities, including ad fraud (click fraud, impression fraud), account takeover attacks, content scraping, form and survey spamming, inventory hoarding, fake account creation, credential stuffing attacks, and API abuse. They can also be utilized to manipulate online polls, reviews, or ratings.
There are a few signs that you might be targeted by bots, such as sudden spikes in traffic, unusual behavior patterns, and high bounce rates. Anura's Bot detection solution can provide a more detailed analysis and confirm if such activities are bot-driven.
Bots can drastically affect businesses and organizations, from inflating advertising costs through fake clicks, compromising user experiences with spam, leading to data breaches, to corrupting analytics accuracy. Bots can also damage customer trust and a brand's reputation. Our Bot detection solution works relentlessly to safeguard your business from these negative impacts.
Bot prevention involves actively blocking malicious bot activity to safeguard websites and digital assets from automated threats. This approach uses detection technologies to identify bot behaviors and stop them before they cause harm, such as click fraud, credential stuffing, or skewing analytics. Bot prevention tools combine real-time data analysis, machine learning, and rules-based filtering to distinguish between legitimate users and bots, ensuring accurate data and protecting revenue.
The best way to prevent bots is through a layered protection approach that includes bot detection software and continuous monitoring. Anura’s platform identifies fake interactions in real time, so you can protect data integrity and ad investments.
Bot protection software is designed to identify, prevent, and mitigate bot-based threats targeting websites, applications, and networks. It combines advanced detection techniques, such as environmental analysis, machine learning, and real-time monitoring, to distinguish between human users and malicious bots. This software safeguards against issues like ad fraud, credential stuffing, and data scraping, ensuring accurate analytics, secure user experiences, and reduced financial losses.
Anura's Bot detection solution offers a host of features, including real-time bot detection and blocking, advanced data analysis, environmental fingerprinting, an extensive rule database, integration capabilities with existing tech stack, detailed reporting and analytics on bot-related activities, and continuous monitoring.
Yes. Website bot prevention software helps ensure that only real people interact with your ads by filtering out automated clicks, fake conversions, and invalid traffic. This protects your advertising spend, preserves accurate attribution, and prevents fraudulent activity from driving up costs or hiding true performance.
Yes. Modern bot prevention software protects across web browsers, platforms, mobile apps, and APIs, by monitoring traffic from both desktop and mobile sources to detect invalid traffic. This prevents fraudulent form fills and ad clicks from an advertising bot.
Yes, if you use the right bot prevention software it should be compatible if you use the right bot prevention software it should be compatible if you use the right bot prevention software it should be compatible. Bot prevention software, like Anura, integrates seamlessly with major advertising networks and analytics tools to stop advertising bots across display, search, and social campaigns.
Bot Advertising refers to the use of automated bots to generate fake interactions with online ads, such as clicks, views, or impressions, without real user engagement. This practice inflates ad metrics, wastes advertising budgets, and can skew campaign performance. It is considered fraudulent and can significantly impact the effectiveness of digital marketing efforts.
To stop bot traffic on your website, you should use an advanced ad fraud detection platform like Anura, which can identify and block suspicious, non-human traffic in real time. By monitoring user behavior and analyzing traffic patterns, Anura helps ensure that only legitimate visitors interact with your site, improving the accuracy of your analytics and protecting your website from fraud.
Website bot detection software works by analyzing environmental patterns to distinguish between human users and automated bots and malicious humans. Website bot detection software flags and blocks invalid traffic to protect data accuracy, prevent fraud, and secure digital assets.
Bot detection is the process of identifying and blocking automated bot traffic to protect websites from fraud and other harmful activities. Effective bot detection solutions, like Anura's, analyze traffic patterns and session data both pre- and post-click, using techniques such as device fingerprinting and machine learning. This helps businesses prevent bot-driven fraud, including ad click fraud, account takeovers, and inventory hoarding, thereby preserving data accuracy, reducing financial losses, and securing user data.
Zombie bots transform devices into unthinking tools, allowing cybercriminals to operate them from afar without the user realizing their system has been hijacked. A group of these zombie bots forms what’s known as a botnet—a network of compromised machines working together to carry out specific actions. Botnets are commonly used to launch Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
Yes, Anura's Bot detection solution can effectively detect both automated and human-assisted bots. Our sophisticated algorithms identify patterns and anomalies associated with all forms of bot activity, ensuring comprehensive protection.
Anura's Bot detection solution is extremely accurate in identifying and blocking fraudulent bot activities, thanks to our advanced algorithms, quality data sources, and our capacity to continuously adapt to evolving bot techniques. We maintain a high level of precision to eliminate false positives and negatives.
Yes, our solution is built to stay one step ahead of evolving bot techniques and tactics. We continuously update our algorithms and detection mechanisms based on emerging bot patterns, ensuring our solution remains effective against evolving threats.
Yes, our comprehensive fraud solution offers real-time monitoring and alerts for bot-related activities. It constantly monitors user interactions, analyzes environment, and provides immediate alerts or notifications when suspicious bot activities are detected. This enables businesses to respond promptly and take necessary actions to prevent fraud.
Yes, Anura provides detailed insights and analytics on bot-related fraud patterns. It offers comprehensive reports, visualizations, and dashboard that highlight bot traffic, attack vectors, fraudulent activities, and associated metrics. These insights enable businesses to understand the nature and impact of bot-driven fraud, helping them make informed decisions and improve their fraud prevention strategies.
Absolutely, Anura's Bot detection solution is designed with flexibility and can be tailored to meet the unique requirements of each business. We understand that each business has its own set of challenges and we strive to provide a solution that not only detects and prevents bot-driven fraud, but also fits seamlessly into your operational landscape.
