Automated Bot Traffic and Fredhopper

E-commerce traffic is rapidly shifting from traditional search engines to AI agents and chatbots. These automated clients need to explore and query sites to power real-time shopping experiences, making them an increasingly important source of traffic.

This shift also brings challenges. Left unchecked, automated queries can overwhelm back-ends with duplicate calls, drive up costs, and distort analytics. At the same time, malicious bots and scrapers continue to generate unwanted traffic, often blending in with legitimate automation.

To address this, businesses should optimise caching to ensure repeated queries are served efficiently, keeping the impact on back-end systems minimal. Combined with rate limiting, monitoring, and bot filtering, this approach allows beneficial bots to operate while keeping infrastructure stable, data reliable, and malicious traffic under control.

Since all Fredhopper queries go through your infrastructure:

• You decide which requests go to Fredhopper.
• You can block, cache, or throttle as needed.
• You can log and monitor usage patterns.

In short: you are in the best position to prevent misuse.

Failure to address these issues could lead to:

• Exceeded licensed query limits
• Distorted search analytics
• Performance and cost issues

Talk to your technical team to make sure you:

• Secure your Proxy or Middleware.
• Filter bot traffic.
• Use a caching strategy to manage the number and frequency of requests.
• Rate limit external requests.
• Monitor your usage of Fredhopper.

For more information on implementation, please consult our technical best practice guides for Traffic Monitoring and Handling Automated Traffic.