Bot Visibility
IO River automatically classifies requests, whether they come from a human, a known (verified or similar) bot, or a suspicious automated client. This gives you full visibility into the nature of traffic hitting your service, without relying solely on block/allow decisions.
IO River determines bot classification using a combination of signals, including request fingerprints (such as TLS characteristics, HTTP/2 settings, and header ordering) and IP reputation data. This multi-signal approach allows IO River to identify bots accurately even when they attempt to mimic legitimate browser behavior.
In addition, you can improve IO River bot classification by adding more signals for the bot classification engine to consider. To do that add the JS Detection code snippet to the HTML pages of your application. See JS Detection for more information.
Bot Classifications
Each request is assigned one of the following classifications:
- Likely human — Requests that appear to originate from human interaction with the site.
- Verified bot — Requests from well-known bots that IO River can identify individually (e.g., search engine crawlers, monitoring agents).
- Likely bot — Requests that appear to originate from non-human interaction with the site, but cannot be individually identified.
- Detected bot — Requests that definitively originate from non-human, automated activity.
Bot Visibility Dashboard
The Bot Visibility page provides an overview of bot activity across your service:
- Summary — A breakdown of traffic by classification (Likely human, Verified bot, Likely bot, Detected bot), showing the volume and share of each category.
- Over-time chart — A multi-line chart tracking each classification over time, helping you spot trends and anomalies.
- Verified bot categories — A detailed breakdown of verified bot traffic by category, showing request counts, percentage of total verified bot traffic, and a sparkline for each category. Clicking a category opens the full analytics page for that bot type.
Bots Visibility in Security Analytics
The Security Analytics page allows you to view and analyze bots traffic.
For example, you can:
- Break down the overall traffic based on the Bot Classification, to view human vs. verified bots vs. other bots over time.
- Filter traffic to show a specific verified bot category, and examine its geographical location.
- Filter traffic on a specific bot, and examine individual requests in the sampled logs.
JS Detection
This small code snippet provides IO River bot classifier with more anonymous signals that it can use to differentiate human activity, vs. verified bot activity, vs. rogue bot activity.
To enable this, add the following snippet to the HTML pages of your application:
<script src="/ioriver-challenge/bot-detection.js" defer></script>
After you do this, go to the Security > Bot Management page, and enable js detection flag (tells us to expect the data when we analyze bot result)
Verified Bots
Verified Bots Categories
IO River can idnetify verified bots, and divides them into the following populer categories:
| Category | Examples |
|---|---|
| AI | openai-crawler, facebook-crawler |
| Search Engine | google-crawler, ahrefs-crawler |
| Advertising | google-adsbot, msn-crawler |
| FeedFetcher | google-feedfetcher, rssing-crawler |
| Preview | bing-preview, google-favicon |
| Monitor | uptimebot-monitor, newrelic-monitor |
| Social | discord-crawler, tiktok-crawler |
| Optimizer | google-lighthouse, cloudflare-prefetch |
| Academic | leipzig-findlinks, utexas-crawler |
| Webhook | stripe-webhook |
| Programmatic | python-aiohttp, javascript-axios |
| Tool | wget, postman |
| Archive | webarchive-crawler |