The e-commerce landscape is changing rapidly. According to the 2025 Imperva Bad Bot Report by Thales, 51% of all web traffic in 2024 came from automated systems rather than human shoppers. While some of this traffic represents exciting opportunities like ChatGPT Shopping helping customers discover your products, much of it poses serious threats to your business.
At Aurora Commerce, we've enhanced our e-commerce security solutions to ensure you capture the benefits of AI-powered shopping while staying protected from the risks.
Modern retailers need comprehensive retail bot protection: how do you block malicious bots that can crash your site, steal inventory, or compromise customer accounts, while still welcoming the AI shoppers and bots like SEO crawlers that could become a significant revenue channel?
We experienced this challenge firsthand when one of our client's sites was hit by a distributed bot attack, sourced from many countries and thousands of IP addresses. This increased traffic three-fold within minutes and continued to uncontrollably increase over time. Page load times increased and site performance was impacted as the bot crawled a wide range of resource intensive un-cached URLs. Within an hour, our team had the attack blocked and site performance restored but the incident highlighted why proactive protection is essential.
Aurora Commerce now includes advanced malicious bot prevention using AWS WAF Challenge that works silently in the background and CAPTCHA actions. Your legitimate customers never see it, AI shopping assistants can still discover your products and legitimate SEO crawlers are unchallenged, but malicious bots get stopped before they can cause damage.
The system can automatically identify and handle different types of traffic, including:
While competitors struggle with choosing between security and AI accessibility, Aurora Commerce clients get both without the hosting/scaling costs to support vast armies of bots. Your products remain discoverable to AI shopping platforms and SEO that could drive significant new sales, while your site stays protected from the threats that can bring down less prepared competitors.
This protection comes as part of your Aurora Commerce platform with no additional fees, no separate vendors to manage, no complex implementation projects.
The numbers tell the story: malicious bots now account for 37% of all internet traffic and are growing more sophisticated every day. At the same time, AI shopping is projected to become an $8 billion market by 2032. Companies that can't navigate both realities will find themselves either vulnerable to attacks or invisible to the next generation of shoppers.
Aurora Commerce, with over a decade of e-commerce platform experience, ensures you're positioned for both challenges, with enterprise-grade protection that's already proven in production and ready to scale with your business.
Want to understand how Aurora Commerce keeps you competitive in the AI shopping era while protecting your business?
Q: How does e-commerce bot protection work?
Aurora Commerce uses AWS WAF Challenge that operates invisibly and CAPTCHA technology, allowing legitimate customers, SEO and AI shopping assistants through while blocking malicious automated traffic before it can impact your site performance or steal inventory.
Q: Why do online retailers need bot security?With 51% of web traffic now automated and 37% being malicious, retailers without proper protection face site crashes, inventory theft, account takeovers, increased hosting costs, and lost revenue while missing opportunities from legitimate AI shopping platforms.
Sources:
2025 Imperva Bad Bot Report by Thales
Coherent Market Insights - Virtual Shopping Assistant Market Report
