A bot policy is the set of technical and community rules that automated clients must follow when they interact with a service. It usually defines who can run a bot, what identifiers it must use, how often it may send requests, which endpoints it may access, and what kinds of actions require approval. In practice, a bot policy turns “automation is allowed” into controlled, auditable behavior.
In cyber security, bot policies matter because they protect availability and reduce abuse. Public services use them with rate limits, authentication, and logging to stop runaway scripts, scraping, spam, and request floods. Attackers may try to imitate legitimate bots to hide malicious traffic or to push a service beyond its limits. Defenders use bot policies to separate trusted automation from unknown clients, restrict retries, and detect abnormal request patterns before they become a denial-of-service or other operational problem.