Anti-bot protection is a set of controls that detect and block automated access that imitates or exceeds normal user behavior. It is used on websites and APIs to stop scraping, credential attacks, fraud, inventory abuse, and other forms of automation that can overwhelm services or extract data at scale.
These defenses usually combine rate limits, request quotas, device and client fingerprinting, CAPTCHA or challenge steps, session correlation, IP reputation, and behavioral analysis of timing, retries, and navigation patterns. In attacks, bots often rotate IPs, reuse accounts, or run from cloud infrastructure to look less obvious. More advanced automation can adapt to blocks, vary delays, and chain actions like a human operator. For defenders, anti-bot protection is strongest when layered: no single signal is enough, so teams correlate traffic patterns, authenticate users, and apply dynamic policy rather than relying on simple request counting alone.