Googlebot

But the majority of bots are things like web crawlers and indexers, which, you know, without going into too much detail 'cause it might bore a lot of our listeners, like search engines like Yandex rely on web crawler bots and indexer bots which scan and download data from websites and put it into essentially a, a data set that is then indexed so that when you use the search engine, it uses that data set to find web pages based on your search terms, et cetera.

So a lot of bot activity is things like Yandex Bot or Google Bot.

When Cloudflare basically reported this reduction in bot traffic, it was the web crawlers and the indexer bots that they were reporting and not like random bot accounts on Twitter posting disinformation.

Yeah, and, and I think that when people are talking about bots here, they are thinking of the bots of a decade ago, which was a period of time, quite a short period of time, to be honest, where it was possible to create inauthentic accounts to make them look like real people and to deliberately sow division.

And I even double-checked.

I opened Radar's bot directory, which is like a Cloudflare list of every bot that's verified, and I searched for Yandex, found that Cloudflare files YandexBot under search engine crawler right next to Googlebot and Bingbot, and it describes it as the main indexing robot for YandexSearch.

And you see this is where the half-truths and half-lies come in, because the famous drop that everybody was talking about was Russia's Google going offline.

And yet the chart that everybody shared across X, yes, was the correct chart, but they were saying that it was proof that all of these propaganda bots had died, when in reality that chart was a search engine going dark.

In Cloudflare's language, a bot is any automated web request.

Nearly all automated traffic from Yandex's network is YandexBot, its search crawler, which is Russia's version of Googlebot, right? So that's what has declined.

Now, while the people who are saying, like, "No, it's wrong that, like, Russian bot, you know, influence operations collapsed as a result of these strikes," that's also led some people to say, like, there's been no impact in Russia's influence operations as a result of these strikes.

I can't imagine that's true.

They were regular visitors.

There weren't that many of them in reality, Google Bot being the most famous one.

You should have your website in a certain way, and it was easy to read and so forth.

We're getting hit, I think I saw the other day, the stats, 1,200 a day on average now.

First of all, that you have, like, completely above the board, there are independent indexes being built, third-party indexes that power other search engines than Google.

A reality for anyone wanting to com- compete with Google in terms of search, whether or not you get the result in the chat bot or on, on, on a normal sort of search page, is you need connection to a lot of data.

And you could either build your own Google bot or you buy this service from someone else.

So a lot of the agents that come by are actually representatives of some form of data aggregator or middleman of some kind.