Automated bot detection
Understand how Skro identifies suspicious traffic and choose whether to mark, block, or redirect detected bot visits.
Protect Your Campaigns from Invalid Traffic
Bots, crawlers, spiders, proxies, and VPN services can negatively impact campaign performance by generating invalid clicks, skewing statistics, consuming budgets, and making optimization decisions less accurate.
To help advertisers maintain clean and reliable traffic, Skro includes an intelligent Automated Bot Detection system that continuously identifies and classifies suspicious traffic before it affects your campaigns.
Our detection engine analyzes multiple signals, including:
- Browser User Agent
- IP Address reputation
- ASN (Autonomous System Number)
- Known crawler networks
- Cloud hosting providers
- VPN and proxy networks
The system currently maintains a database of more than 26,000 known IP addresses and continuously monitors traffic from major search engine crawlers, cloud providers, hosting companies, proxy services, and VPN networks.
Detected Networks and Services
Skro automatically identifies traffic originating from:
- Googlebot
- Bingbot
- Applebot
- Meta
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
- Microsoft Azure
- DigitalOcean
- Oracle Cloud
- Hetzner
- OVHcloud
- Cloudflare
- Google Ads Fetchers
- Google Special Crawlers
- Vultr
- Linode
- Scaleway
- Tor Exit Nodes
- NordVPN
- ExpressVPN
- Surfshark
- CyberGhost VPN
- Private Internet Access (PIA)
Bot Handling Actions
When bot traffic is detected, you can choose how Skro should handle the request.
Mark as Bot
Detected traffic is marked as bot traffic but is still processed normally.
Behavior:
- Clicks and visits are recorded in statistics.
- Traffic can be analyzed and reported separately.
- Campaign rules can route bot traffic to dedicated paths.
- Useful for monitoring and analysis purposes.
Block (403 Forbidden)
The connection is immediately terminated and the visitor receives a 403 Forbidden response.
Behavior:
- Access is denied.
- Traffic is not recorded in campaign statistics.
- Prevents bots from interacting with your campaigns.
Block (404 Not Found)
The connection is immediately terminated and the visitor receives a 404 Not Found response.
Behavior:
- The requested resource appears unavailable.
- Traffic is not recorded in campaign statistics.
- Useful when you prefer not to reveal that access was intentionally blocked.
Redirect to URL
Detected bot traffic is redirected to a destination URL of your choice.
Behavior:
- Bots are redirected before reaching the campaign.
- Traffic is not recorded in campaign statistics.
- Useful for sending bots to a safe destination or decoy page.
Why Use Automated Bot Detection?
By filtering invalid traffic before it reaches your campaigns, Automated Bot Detection helps:
- Improve data accuracy
- Protect advertising budgets
- Reduce fraudulent clicks
- Improve campaign optimization
- Keep reports clean and actionable
- Gain greater visibility into traffic quality
With Automated Bot Detection enabled, you can focus on real users while Skro automatically handles unwanted traffic in the background.
Related guides
Need help with this guide? Contact Skro support.