2026 Agenda

 

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Good Bot, Bad Bot... Human in a Bot Costume?

Britt Hall  (VP, Product, Optimizely)
Location: Room 201
Date: Monday, October 5
Time: 11:30 am - 12:00 pm
Pass Type: All Access, Digital, CMWorld 2-Day, CMWorld 3-Day - Get your pass now!
Session Type: Sponsored Session
Track: Partner Case Studies
Vault Recording: Video
Britt Hall

Content marketers have spent years learning to distrust and filter out bot traffic, and mostly, they're right to. Scrapers steal content and fraud bots inflate metrics. Those are bad bots. Then there are neutral bots, quietly crawling and indexing your site for some future use you'll probably never see. But a new kind of bot has shown up, and it breaks the old rules: AI agents acting in real time on behalf of an actual customer, researching, comparing, even buying, right now. They are your customers.


This session gives content marketers a new lens for thinking about the bot traffic already hitting their site and makes the case that treating all three the same might already be costing you real customers. We'll cover the signals worth watching for, why a legitimate agent deserves the benefit of the doubt instead of suspicion, and what marketing teams need to start building to keep up.

Takeaway

  • A framework for thinking about the bot traffic hitting your site - bad, neutral, and customer-proxy - and why treating them all the same is now areal cost, not just an old habit.
  • Signals worth watching for that suggest a bot might be acting on behalf of a real customer. The point isn't certainty, it's taking the possibility seriously.
  • The three capabilities content and marketing teams need next: visibility into how agents represent your brand, safe ways for agents to act on your site, and the ability to test what they actually experience.