Incentives, Not Villains

Most marketers still navigate their work with a map that says "the internet is mostly people browsing." Using that map won't get you killed, but it will have you walking toward the cliff. Here is one consequence of the territory beneath us changing in real time.

It's tempting to hear "58% bot traffic" and think they are all bad actors engaged in fraud; therefore, we must kill it with fire. But that framing is way too narrow. Why? Because bots aren't just one thing or another.

• Some scrape your pricing page to undercut you.
• Some are AI agents booking a flight on behalf of a real customer.
• Some are search crawlers that have been indexing the web since before "SEO" was a job title.

And if you decide to treat them all the same, you'll probably end up breaking the good ones trying to stop the bad ones. So, what we have here is not a security problem (yes, there are significant security considerations), but a classic incentives problem. The challenge then seems to be how to build systems that can tell the difference between which behaviors I am trying to encourage and which I am trying to discourage, and not just "how do I block all the bad bots?" Be aware of the pull to lump everything under one label, which is obviously the easier move, but it is also the wrong one.