Hydrolix unveils Bot Insights to expose costly AI bots

Hydrolix has launched Bot Insights, a product aimed at monitoring and analysing automated traffic from AI-driven crawlers, agents and other bots across websites and web applications.

The Portland-based real-time data platform company said the product focuses on visibility into bot activity across major content delivery networks, with a combination of real-time views and longer-term traffic analysis.

Hydrolix positions the release against a backdrop of growing automation on the public internet. It cited figures that place automated traffic above half of overall traffic during 2024, with malicious bots accounting for roughly a third of all internet activity. It also said AI-driven bot traffic rose 300% in the past year.

Cost pressures

Hydrolix links unwanted bot traffic with infrastructure spend, fraud risk and volatile traffic patterns. It also points to effects on advertising and search, with estimates that digital ad fraud accounts for around 22% of global advertising spend, or roughly $84 billion each year. The company also cited industry figures that put invalid paid search clicks at 14% to 22%, with bots accounting for nearly 40% of that fraudulent activity.

The company described a scenario in which traffic bypassed perimeter controls and reached origin infrastructure, driving up bills from network providers and cloud services. It also flagged credential-based attacks, which attackers often automate at scale, as an area of continued growth.

"Most traffic on the internet is driven by bots, and it's crushing companies' bottom lines," said Tom Howe, Director of Field Engineering at Hydrolix and former Director of Software Engineering for Quality Targeting and Experience at Disney.

Howe gave an example of unexpected costs linked to unwanted traffic reaching origin systems. "One of our customers reported a six-figure overcharge from their ISP due to traffic they didn't want. The traffic bypassed the firewall, reached the origin web server, and drove up costs by six figures. If you can't stop that, you waste your resources, time, and money. Bot Insights prevents that kind of loss by automatically detecting and alerting on bypasses before they result in overage charges," said Howe.

Product focus

Hydrolix said Bot Insights ingests and correlates bot and crawler activity data across web properties and CDNs. It said the product classifies bot behaviours and identifies AI bot and agentic AI requests. The company said this initial release targets teams across security operations, threat hunting, marketing, web operations and executive roles.

The company also set Bot Insights against approaches that rely on sampling or short data retention periods. It said its platform supports long-term retention for investigations and trend analysis across months or years, with dashboards that show bot traffic patterns and spikes.

Hydrolix described use cases that include investigations of sudden traffic changes, analysis of seasonal patterns, and identification of repeated crawling activity associated with AI model training. It also pointed to detection of activity consistent with bot swarms and potential distributed denial-of-service patterns.

"Unwanted bot traffic is no longer just a security problem; it's a six-figure infrastructure and revenue problem that AI is only accelerating," said Dr. Chase Cunningham, Zero Trust and Cyber Warfare Expert.

"Unwanted bot traffic is no longer just a security problem; it's a six-figure infrastructure and revenue problem that AI is only accelerating," said Cunningham. "Bot Insights translates ever-scaling bot activity into clear, actionable insights in real time and also unlocks critical seasonal analytics that have been missing for so long. This allows businesses to automatically detect and prevent costly usage charges and erosion of search revenue and prepares them for the ai-enabled future. Every online business needs this in today's digital first ecosystem," said Cunningham.

Integrations and retention

Hydrolix said Bot Insights includes pre-built integrations and dashboards for major CDNs. It said this reduces the need for custom data pipelines. The company also highlighted retention for historical analysis, and trend reporting by vendor, request volume and crawl frequency.

"Bot Insights uncovers the hidden threat and cost of bots and agents across your digital business," said Tony Falco, COO, Hydrolix.

"The solution gives real-time visibility into every bot, crawler, and AI agent hitting your business. With Bot Insights, your teams can classify the traffic with extreme accuracy-whether they are good bots, partner crawlers, unauthorized AI scrapers, credential-stuffing bots, impersonators, or emerging agentic attack agents-and make mitigation decisions instantly, significantly reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR)," said Falco.

Hydrolix said Bot Insights is available now.