Advanced Bot Detection: Score, Control, and Report on Bot Traffic Across Your Entire Pipeline

Bot traffic has been a growing problem for years, but the last 12 months have been a step change. We work with some of the highest-trafficked healthcare sites in the world, and the pattern I'm seeing is consistent: bot and scraper volume is climbing while real human traffic is flat or declining. That ratio matters. When bots make up a larger share of your total traffic, every metric they touch gets worse. Inflated page views, polluted conversion funnels, wasted ad spend on audiences that include non-humans, and attribution models trained on noise.

Most teams know this. The problem is that the tools available to deal with it have always been binary. Block everything or allow everything. That's not useful when your marketing team needs accurate conversion data in ad platforms but also wants full visibility into traffic patterns for security and capacity planning.

We built Advanced Bot Detection to give you granular control instead of a toggle.

How It Works

Every event that enters the Ours Privacy pipeline gets a behavioral bot score from 0 to 100. The scoring model reflects what we've learned from processing billions of events about how bots actually behave in the wild. A score of 0 means the event looks fully human. A score of 100 means it's almost certainly automated.

The score is just an event property. It flows through your entire pipeline like any other property, which means you can filter on it, build reports around it, set up alerts, or use it in audience segments. For the full technical breakdown of how scoring works, see our bot detection documentation.

Once you enable Advanced Bot Detection in your source configuration, you decide what happens to bot traffic.

Three Layers of Control

Most bot detection tools give you one setting. I kept hearing from customers that they wanted different rules for different parts of the pipeline. Block bots from ad platforms but keep them in analytics. Or see them in reporting but never let them reach the CRM. So that's what we built. Instead of one global setting, you get three enforcement points across the pipeline:

1. Block and drop at ingest. Events from bots never touch the database. If you know you don't want bot data in your system at all, this is the cleanest option. The event is scored, identified as a bot, and dropped before storage.

2. Allow through ingest, stop at the Global Dispatch Center. The event gets stored (so you have visibility and can report on bot volume), but it never reaches any downstream destination. This is useful when you want to quantify the problem without letting bot data pollute your ad platforms or CRM.

3. Allow through ingest, stop at specific destinations with custom rules. The most flexible option. Maybe you want bot traffic in your analytics for volume reporting but need to strip it before it reaches Google Ads or your Meta conversion API. Or maybe one destination is more sensitive than another. Custom rules let you define per-destination enforcement so the same event can flow to some places and get blocked from others.

All three options work together with the consent-based routing you already have in the Global Dispatch Center. Bot rules and consent rules compose cleanly. You don't have to choose between them.

Why This Matters More Now

Two things are happening at the same time.

First, bot traffic is growing. Scrapers, AI crawlers, and automated tools are hitting healthcare sites harder than ever. Every CDP and analytics platform that doesn't filter bots is counting that traffic as real visitors. That means your visitor counts, conversion rates, and cost-per-acquisition numbers are all off.

Second, real human traffic to many sites is flat or declining as search behavior shifts and AI-generated answers reduce click-through. When your human traffic pool shrinks, the relative impact of bot contamination gets worse. A 10% bot rate on 100,000 visits is annoying. A 30% bot rate on 60,000 visits means nearly a third of your data is useless.

If you're making budget decisions, campaign optimizations, or attribution judgments on data that includes bot traffic, you're making them on bad inputs.

Reporting

Bot detection without visibility is just a black box. We built native reporting so you can see exactly what's happening.

The bot score is a standard event property, which means it works with everything else in the platform. Build dashboards that show bot traffic volume over time. Break it down by page, by source, by campaign. Compare bot rates across different parts of your site to identify which pages are being targeted. Use it in the Audience Builder to create segments of known-bot visitors for analysis.

If you're presenting to leadership about data quality, you now have the numbers to back it up.

No Billing Surprises

You control where bots are blocked, and you have the dashboards to see exactly what's happening. No surprises.

Getting Started

Enable Advanced Bot Detection in your source configuration. Once enabled, every event starts receiving a bot score. From there, configure your enforcement rules in the Data Governance hub under the Dispatch tab, or set up ingest-level blocking if you want bots dropped before storage.

For the full technical setup, see our bot detection documentation. To learn more about configuring sources and tags, see the tag manager docs.

Want to see it in action? Book a demo.