How to block bot traffic with exclusion lists in 2026

To block bot traffic successfully, marketers should understand that bot-generated traffic is not a minor inconvenience but can damage ad budgets, performance metrics, and even marketing campaigns.

According to industry estimates, 15-30% of all digital ad traffic is invalid, or a large portion of paid clicks does not come from actual users.

In fact, studies show that bots accounted for about 37% of global web traffic in 2024, and the share continues to rise year after year as sophistication increases.

This article will explore how best to block bot traffic with an exclusion list, why such a process is necessary to assure campaign integrity, and how ClickPatrol solves the issue by detecting and blocking invalid traffic at its source.

How bad bot traffic is driving invalid activity across the internet

Bots currently account for a large share of overall online activity, and an increasing share is fraudulent or otherwise invalid.

According to Statista, fraudulent traffic, also known as bad bot traffic, accounted for 37% of total Internet traffic in 2024, up 12% from the previous year.

These figures indicate the following broader reality:

• Virtually half of all internet communication is driven by machines, unlike human interaction.
• Among bot traffic, a significant portion is malicious, designed to scrape information, generate fake clicks, and drain marketing budgets.

Naturally, when traffic volumes are large but not human, they interfere with campaign performance and the data describing user actions.

Most alarmingly, bots can easily mimic human behavior; therefore, unless detection mechanisms are comprehensive, tools like filters are insufficient to tackle the issue.

This poses a critical need for marketers to filter out bot visits before they ever interact with your site or its statistics.

What is bot traffic and why it matters for digital advertising

It is important to first define bot traffic before delving into exclusion lists and safeguarding measures, as this helps explain why bot traffic is harmful.

What are bots?

Bots are automated programs or scripts that interact with websites and other digital properties.

Although not all bots are malicious (e.g., search engine crawlers indexing content), many have malicious or deceptive uses:

• Bad bots: those that steal information, scrape, imitate bot signatures, and produce fraudulent clicks.
• Click bots target pay-per-click (PPC) ads to generate artificial clicks, causing advertisers to spend money.
• Crawler bots: Spider websites to find content, or weaknesses, and could be harmless or malicious, depending on intent.

The effects of bot traffic on your bottom line

There are several ways that bot traffic will impact your marketing performance:

• Waste in ad costs: Bots waste ad impressions and clicks, increasing costs without generating actual conversions.
• Distorted analytics: Overstated metrics will complicate measuring campaign success and engagement.
• Lower ROI: Ad spend is directed to fraudulent engagements, which lowers ROI.
• Conversion distortion: Bots can fake sign-ups or leads, resulting in spurious signals in growth metrics.

It is not merely a single risk; invalid traffic and bot activity are quantifiable threats to industries.

The 2024 traffic report from ClickPatrol itself shows that bot traffic accounts for a significant share of all fake clicks, with yearly peaks and troughs.

Beyond individual brand measurements, industry-wide data provide a compelling narrative: an average of 14% of responses to sponsored search results are fraudulent, and up to 60% of clicks occur in certain industries, such as on-demand services.

These numbers highlight the need to safeguard your online advertising budget using powerful bot mitigation.

Common sources of bot-driven invalid traffic in digital ads

There is no single source of bot traffic. Knowing its origin enables you to block more efficiently.

Bots and click farms

Cybercriminals use bot networks or click farms, which consist of automated or low-wage human users, to generate artificial engagement. It has a financial motive: they drain ad budgets or disrupt rival campaigns.

Automated scripts and tools

There are bots programmed to simulate browsing or clicking in large numbers. They can bypass the filters of mere scanners since, at the surface level, they act like any other user.

Competitor sabotage

Bad actors also use bots in competitive industries to pocket competitors’ ad budgets by repeatedly clicking on their ads.

Crawlers and scrapers

Although most crawlers have benign goals (e.g., indexing), others scrape content or otherwise interact with advertising in non-human manners, inadvertently generating invalid traffic.

What are exclusion lists?

An exclusion list (or blocklist) is a compiled list of Internet Protocol addresses, user agents, segments, or traffic sources that are known or suspected to produce bot traffic.

With entries to these lists, you stop known bad traffic before it can interact with your site or ads. Exclusion lists operate by blocking requests whose source matches:

• Suspicious IP ranges
• Bot-like user agents
• Known malicious subnets
• Repeat bot patterns

This not only flags these interactions but also prevents them at the source to ensure they do not spend ad funds or disrupt analytics.

How to block bot traffic with exclusion lists

Block bot traffic via exclusion lists using these operational steps:

Gather data on invalid traffic

Detection is at the foundation of exclusion. You cannot effectively block traffic that you don’t even know contains bots.

Tools such as ClickPatrol use click patterns, user behavior, and other factors to try to determine which traffic is human and which is bot.

Identify bot signatures/patterns: SignInworkflow

Suspicious traffic identified and subsequently grouped by patterns involving IP addresses and user agents is said to be suspicion-modeled and categorized as exclusion-list signals.

Apply the exclusion list

After establishing the patterns, exclusion lists are then used at an ad platform/site level.

• Allows exclusion of IP addresses on PPC platforms
• Web Servers Filter Bot User Agents
• Analytics and campaign tools can prevent known bot traffic

Continuously update exclusion lists

Bot operators continue to adapt their strategies. Exclusion lists must be updated in real time based on evolving information from website traffic.

Enforce exclusions before campaign launches

Blocking at the source, before robots ever visit your sites, is far more efficient than filtering them out retroactively.

Step-by-step guide to creating exclusion lists

Exclusion lists can benefit every business, but creating them requires a systematic approach.

Evaluate existing traffic quality

Begin by analyzing your current traffic to detect suspicious trends. Identify spikes with zero conversions, high bounce rates, or unusual geographic origins using analytics tools.

Locate familiar bot patterns

Bots frequently present themselves with distinct identifiers:

• Geolocation trends that are not target audience-oriented.
• False user agent strings.
• List of known malicious IP addresses.

Build your exclusion list

List the identified IPs, user agents, and referral domains corresponding with bot behavior.

Depending on your business and campaign objectives, this list should be customized.

Apply to ad platform configurations

Most advertising platforms allow the addition of exclusion lists, especially IP lists. This ensures that ads are not delivered to such sources and will minimize wasted spend.

Align with analytics and security tools

Make sure analytics and bot protection systems, such as ClickPatrol, share the same set of exclusion rules so your insights are consistent across tools.

Monitor and update regularly

Bots evolve fast. Periodically review your exclusion lists to add new sources or remove false alarms, keeping your defences current.

How ClickPatrol solves bot traffic and invalid clicks

ClickPatrol was built for precisely this challenge: to detect and block invalid traffic at its source, so bot traffic never impacts your costs or data.

Here’s how ClickPatrol will help you block bot traffic:

First detection

Instead of using only static rules, ClickPatrol monitors every click in real time to identify patterns indicative of bot activities, such as:

• Unusually high frequency of clicks: Repeat clicks coming from the same source
• Abnormal engagement rates: This is encompassed within a comprehensive detection mechanism that allows only genuine human traffic through.

Automatic excluded list generation

ClickPatrol will create exclusion entries, whether it be IPs, user agents, or segments, once it recognizes a pattern of invalid traffic, automatically applying this to future campaigns and traffic sources.

Source-level blocking

Instead of just filtering bot traffic ex-post, ClickPatrol blocks known bad traffic at its origin, meaning:

• You will never pay for a fraudulent ad click
• Bot traffic never enters your analytics
• Performance metrics accurately represent the real behavior of users

Ongoing updates: With ClickPatrol’s constantly updated intelligence, your exclusion lists dynamically evolve with emerging trends in bot traffic.

This is highly critical as bot sophistication rises and average bot share increases year over year.

Advanced strategies for bot mitigation beyond exclusion lists

Exclusion lists can be powerful tools, especially when used with other security tools.

• Anomaly detection rules: Set automated alerts for behaviors such as high traffic volume without corresponding conversions.
• Engagement thresholds: Use additional interaction metrics beyond click count alone (such as visit duration and scroll depth).
• CAPTCHA or robot challenge: Challenges within the form or checkout phase can decrease the rate of auto-submissions.
• Session Validation: Check whether visitors behave as expected over time, rather than just on a single click.
• Careful campaign setup: Excluding geographic areas and low-quality placements can minimize exposure risk.

Common misconceptions of bot traffic exclusion

Here are some common misconceptions about bot traffic exclusion:

“Bots only affect large companies.”

Not true. Even small and medium-sized businesses suffer from bot traffic and click fraud, especially if they run PPC campaigns or rely heavily on analytics.

“It is enough to have static lists.”

Bots adapt rather quickly. Static lists are outdated the moment they become available unless they are continuously updated with newer bot signatures.

“All bots are bad.”

Not all bots are bad; for example, search engine crawlers should definitely not be blocked. Exclusion lists should target malicious or invalid traffic.

How to block bot traffic and protect your digital ad budget

Bot traffic is no longer a fringe issue; it’s a core threat to digital marketing performance, especially for paid campaigns.

When bots chew up your ad budget or distort your analytics, you’re ultimately left paying for clicks that never convert, a really bad place for any marketer to be.

There is a solution, though: block bot traffic by keeping exclusion lists that filter the known bad sources at the source.

With tools such as ClickPatrol, you can identify and block invalid traffic before it affects your campaigns, resulting in cleaner data, higher ROI, and better performance insights.

Knowing where bot traffic originates, how it behaves, and how to proactively keep it out means you’re protecting not just your budget-you’re protecting your entire digital strategy.

Abisola

Meet Abisola! As the content manager at ClickPatrol, she’s the go-to expert on all things fake traffic. From bot clicks to ad fraud, Abisola knows how to spot, stop, and educate others about the sneaky tactics that inflate numbers but don’t bring real results.

View all posts by Abisola (Abisola)

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