79% of enterprise leaders say they’re confident in their ability to detect bot activity, but only 23% have a proactive, comprehensive bot management strategy in place. This research comes from the State of AI Bots in 2026, a Hydrolix survey of 300 enterprise leaders across IT security, engineering, infrastructure, and SRE.
The visibility issue goes beyond detection. As AI agents proliferate, it’s just as important to understand bot intent instead of automatically blocking agent traffic that benefits your business.
To solve this problem, Hydrolix Bot Insights gives teams a shared, long-term view of bots and AI agents hitting your infrastructure, including bot intent, so you can find and fix issues proactively while making informed business decisions about automated traffic.
The importance of this approach is already being validated by customers, and Hydrolix was just listed in TechRound’s AI45 for work around AI, including Bot Insights.
Detecting Bot Intent in the Age of AI
Most bot detection tools focus on flagging traffic spikes, generating alerts, and blocking suspicious sessions. However, they don’t surface intent. Most bot traffic isn’t malicious, and this is especially true in the agentic age, when businesses, customers, and search engines are increasingly turning to an agentic approach to crawl, scrape, and interact with your content.
Here’s an example. When a crawler hits your infrastructure, do you know why? The crawler may be probing your site for vulnerabilities, scraping data for a competitor, or indexing your content for AI search results that could improve your SEO and GEO visibility. You definitely want to block the first one, you may want to block the second, and you definitely don’t want to block the third. But if you don’t understand bot intent, then you’ll inadvertently block automated traffic that helps your business, or you may let through malicious traffic that should be blocked.
The distinction between good and bad intent matters operationally. More than half of survey respondents (51%) use bots for uptime monitoring. Nearly as many (48%) depend on them for SEO. Treating bots as threats is a one-dimensional approach that doesn’t account for the fact that automated traffic is now a critical part of business. But according to the survey, 23% of enterprises can’t reliably make the distinction between good and bad bots.
The perception gap compounds the problem. Respondents estimate AI bots generate roughly 17% of their traffic. Imperva’s 2026 Bad Bot Report puts automated traffic at more than 53% of all web traffic in 2025. A 36-point gap between what leaders believe about their bot traffic and what independent measurement finds points to a visibility problem that’s more structural than most organizations have reckoned with.
How Bot Insights Addresses the Visibility Problem
Bot Insights gives you long-term, full-fidelity retention of bot and agentic traffic logs across all CDN providers. There are no gaps from sampling, filtering, or data deletion after short retention periods. In the report, 30% of respondents cite fragmented systems and insufficient visibility as a barrier to effective bot management. Insufficient visibility is a direct consequence of short retention windows and siloed CDN logs. You can’t build a coherent picture of bot behavior from incomplete data, let alone build a long-term operational strategy that sets your business up for success.
With access to complete data along with classification, businesses can better understand the intent of automated traffic. And even “good” bot traffic can drive up costs. For example, crawlers might go to URLs that don’t have cached traffic, driving up your CDN bills. With Hydrolix Bot Insights, businesses are seeing a 95% reduction in incident attribution time and 20–30% reduction in bot-driven infrastructure costs.
These operational benefits can only happen when you give security, operations, and SEO teams a shared source of truth rather than separate reports built from different data sets. Using comprehensive CDN data as the source of truth, Bot Insights offers persona-based dashboards for each team, giving you the visibility you need for a wide range of use cases from the C-suite to security and operations.
Next Steps
- Download the State of AI Bots in 2026 to see the full findings of our industry-wide report.
- Read The Majority of Your Traffic Isn’t Human, and It’s Costing You to learn how bot traffic drives up costs, and how you can use Bot Insights to get visibility into the problem.
- Learn how Bot Insights gives you persona-based dashboards for all your teams.
