Bots are Taking Over the Web. Why that May not be a Bad Thing for Retail Marketers

LLMs and AI Agents are reshaping how the web operates and how consumers interact with it. As AI-powered shopping assistants increasingly drive purchase decisions, retail sites are now serving a dual audience: human shoppers and the AI agents that influence them. WP Engine’s new 2025 Website Traffic Trends Report reveals that nearly one in three web requests now come from bots, and AI-driven traffic consumes up to 70% of the most costly dynamic resources. For retail marketing teams in 2026, the strategic imperative is learning to optimize for both audiences, ensuring content is discoverable to LLMs while maintaining fast, reliable experiences for human shoppers. Today’s bot traffic is a spectrum, from AI agents (driven by LLMs) to malicious bots that require active defense. While the terms are often used interchangeably, there’s a key difference: bots traditionally perform narrow, rule-based automated tasks, while AI agents are more autonomous systems capable of making decisions, retrieving information and interacting with content in more human-like ways. For retail marketers, this new reality demands an intelligent traffic management approach that distinguishes between beneficial AI agents and harmful bots. AI agents are increasingly influencing search rankings, content distribution and the customer experience. Web strategies that treat all bots as threats to be blocked or nuisances to be ignored are counterproductive. To keep up, marketers must selectively enable access for AI agents that drive discovery and visibility, like search crawlers and shopping assistants, while actively defending against bots that scrape content, commit fraud or strain infrastructure. In a digital retail marketing landscape already transformed by social media, big data and AI, the rise of agents and bots marks the next strategic frontier. Marketers who embrace this shift early are likely to gain an edge. Not All Bots are Bad, but Ignoring Them is Historically, many businesses viewed bots in black-and-white terms: either as malicious traffic to be blocked or as a passive part of digital operations. But this binary approach is outdated. Helpful agents now shape SEO visibility, support ecommerce platforms and automate essential tasks. At the same time, crawling bots can cause serious harm if left unmanaged. Understanding this duality is essential. A major concern is the unauthorized scraping of content for AI training. Legal battles, such as Thomson Reuters’ recent case against Ross Intelligence, illustrate the growing tensions around data ownership. While the legal landscape is still evolving, businesses must begin balancing content protection with openness to beneficial agent interactions. It’s important to note that not all agent traffic is focused on AI training. Increasingly, AI agents are used for real-time augmentation, such as referencing updated web content for AI-driven search experiences. For retailers, especially those focused on lead generation or digital presence, enabling this type of access can improve visibility and relevance. Search engines, AI applications, ecommerce platforms and even local business directories rely on AI agents to index and distribute content. Blanket blocking of all bot traffic can limit reach, skew analytics and suppress growth. Instead, organizations should implement strategies to differentiate between helpful agents and harmful bots. Often, bot traffic only becomes a concern when unexplained traffic spikes or increased hosting costs surface. Businesses with centralized IT teams may have response plans, but others rely on hosting providers or ignore the issue entirely. This passive stance increases the risk of intellectual property loss, security breaches and missed marketing opportunities. The Right Strategy: Filtering Threats, Leveraging Benefits Effective bot management requires both protection and optimization. Retail marketers must work with IT teams to differentiate between beneficial AI agents and harmful bots, establish rules for access and ensure the digital experience remains both secure and discoverable. When managed well, agents can become a source of valuable insights by informing SEO, personalization strategies and user engagement tactics. The type and volume of bot activity varies by website type. Retail brands with photo archives and content-rich sites attract media crawlers and aggregators. Small businesses, often lacking robust technical resources, may be particularly vulnerable to agent-driven traffic spikes or performance issues. Cross-functional collaboration is essential. When security teams drive bot policy without marketing input, helpful agents may be blocked. Conversely, when marketers prioritize openness without adequate controls, they expose the business to unnecessary risks. A coordinated approach ensures high-quality data access for marketers, system integrity for IT teams and accurate performance management for web teams. Basic mitigation techniques like blocking IP addresses or filtering by User-Agent strings are increasingly ineffective. Sophisticated bots now rotate through vast networks of IPs and dynamic User-Agents, bypassing simple filters. Some use over 100,000 unique User-Agents across 70,000 IPs. This requires smarter, behavior-based solutions. Modern bot management tools can help. There are several solutions that offer real-time analytics, adaptive rate limiting and behavioral fingerprinting. These tools help businesses distinguish between humans and agents, detect malicious bot activity and implement fine-grained access controls to drive superior purchasing experiences. A passive approach to these bots is no longer viable. As AI-driven automation expands, businesses must proactively manage bot interactions. Those that do can convert a challenge into a strategic advantage and even boost sales. In my two decades in marketing — most recently at WP Engine — I’ve seen firsthand how fast digital trends evolve. The businesses that succeed are those that treat data as a strategic asset, invest in the right tools and align their teams around shared goals. With bots playing an ever-larger role in SEO, content visibility and customer interaction, developing a smart, adaptive bot strategy is now a core part of staying competitive in digital marketing. As the Chief Marketing Officer at WP Engine, Darcy Kurtz leads all aspects of the company’s marketing operations, including corporate marketing, product marketing, revenue marketing and marketing operations. With over 30 years of go-to-market experience, Kurtz is known for driving growth in technology companies serving small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) through innovative strategies that connect with digital consumers. Her expertise lies in product marketing, brand management, digital marketing and enhancing customer experience. She has held key roles with organizations in every stage of growth, from small startups to global 50 companies, including Mailchimp, Dell, and several SaaS companies. Most recently at BentoBox, a restaurant SaaS company, she excelled as both CMO and chief revenue officer, leading go-to-market teams to achieve record-breaking revenue growth and facilitating a successful acquisition. At WP Engine, Kurtz focuses on enhancing brand visibility and market share to contribute to the company’s long-term strategic plan.