How This Bot Traffic Calculator Works
The calculator takes four inputs — monthly ad spend, monthly sessions, an estimated bot share, and the paid share of your sessions — and applies five pieces of arithmetic. Nothing is hidden, weighted, or "modeled":
- Spend reaching non-humans per month = monthly ad spend × bot share
- Spend reaching non-humans per year = the monthly figure × 12
- Sessions miscounted per month = monthly sessions × bot share
- Paid sessions in that miscount = monthly sessions × paid share × bot share
- Cost per human paid session = spend ÷ (paid sessions × (1 − bot share)) — compared against the blended cost of spend ÷ paid sessions
The last row is the one worth sitting with: at a 30% bot share, every human paid session costs about 1.43× what your blended numbers claim, because the humans are quietly subsidizing sessions that software consumed. That same inflated denominator is what distorts channel comparisons and multi-touch attribution downstream.
Everything runs client-side in your browser. Nothing you type is submitted or stored; the only state is the shareable URL, which updates as you move the sliders so you can paste your scenario straight into a budget thread.
Why the Default Bot Share Is 30% — and Why Yours Is Different
The slider defaults to 30% because it is a plausible, deliberately illustrative starting point — independent industry research on bad-bot and automated traffic has produced widely varying estimates over the years, and none of them describe your site. Bot load varies enormously by industry, by page type, and by channel: a scraper fleet hammers catalog pages, an uptime monitor pings one URL, and AI agents follow your best-linked content. The site-wide average is almost never the rate on the pages where money changes hands.
So treat the default the way a CFO would: as a placeholder to be replaced by a measurement. The business-case guide that pairs with this tool walks through presenting the result to finance — lead with the measured floor, keep everything you can't defend below the line.
What the Bot Traffic Cost Calculator Leaves Out
This tool computes the floor: direct waste and miscounted volume. It deliberately excludes the second-order costs, because they resist a single honest formula:
- Retargeting pollution — bot sessions that trip on-site events get swept into retargeting and lookalike audiences, and you pay again to re-reach software.
- Experiment delay — non-human sessions dilute A/B tests and slow significance; Bot-Aware A/B Testing works the math, and the companion A/B Test Bot Impact Calculator sizes it for your program.
- Tool metering — analytics and marketing platforms priced per event or tracked user bill you for bot volume too.
- Reporting drift — traffic growth, conversion rates, and board metrics all inherit whatever share of the denominator isn't human.
If the floor alone justifies action, the second-order costs only strengthen the case.
From Estimated Bot Traffic to Measured Bot Traffic
The honest end state is retiring the slider. ClickStream classifies every visitor in real time — a 0–100 Human score from 26 behavioral models CI-benchmarked at p95 under 3 ms per event, one of 11 bot categories, and a name when its registry of 158 bots matches, 38 of them AI agents. The position is label everything, block nothing: your dashboards, experiments, and audiences get a verdict per session, and what to do with it stays your call — including in code:
import { configure, getVisitor } from '@clickstreamhq/signals';
configure({ apiKey: 'cs_live_xxx' }); // browser key: public by design, domain-gated
const visitor = await getVisitor();
if (visitor.bot.isBot) {
// exclude from dashboards, experiments, and audiences — never a wall
}The incentives also line up with the measurement: ClickStream bills on human pageviews only, so bot traffic never draws down your quota, and the vendor measuring your bot problem has no reason to inflate it. The free Hobby tier includes 50K human pageviews a month with no credit card, and install is a 344-byte loader — a couple of weeks of data replaces every assumption on this page with your own numbers. See plans and pricing for what the paid tiers add.