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Bot Protection

Stop bots. Keep customers
moving

Enterprise-grade bot protection tailored for small and medium businesses. Block abuse before it reaches your website - no CAPTCHA, no code changes, no internal security team needed

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Deploy your way: reverse proxy · Cloud · Self-hosted

THE PROBLEM

Modern bots don’t look like bots — and SMBs feel the damage first

Ten years ago, a bot was easy to spot. It came from a data centre. It ignored JavaScript. A simple blocklist stopped it. The internet has flipped.

In numbers:

Bots are now the majority of web traffic — 53% in 2025, up from 51% the year before. Humans are the minority

Bad bots alone reached 40% of all traffic — a seventh straight year of growth

27% of bot attacks now target APIs — logins, checkout and payment endpoints, not just your home page

Bots rent residential proxies — the same home connections your customers use — so blocklists can’t tell them apart

AI tools now solve many CAPTCHAs faster than people, so a puzzle wall mostly slows your real buyers

For SMBs, this is not just a security problem. It’s cost, conversion and control.

What hurts before the owner ever sees an «attack»

Server resources get wasted

Your hosting, cache and database burn cycles on visitors who will never buy

CAPTCHAs punish real customers

Every puzzle adds friction while modern bots find ways around it

robots.txt is only a request

Search crawlers may obey it; unauthorised and AI crawlers can ignore it unless you enforce access technically. → /compare/robots-txt-vs-bot-protection/

Generic DDoS protection misses business-logic abuse

Layer-7 floods and slow attacks look like ordinary browsing until the app is already struggling

Dashboards become noise

Owners need clear answers — what was blocked, why, and what to change next — not raw logs

That is why the old defences keep failing. Blocklists can’t ban an IP your customers share. CAPTCHAs punish real buyers while automation adappts. A classic firewall only checks requests against known attack signatures — a bot behaving «politely» walks straight in.

.SMB positioning

Enterprise-grade protection without enterprise overhead

ADPAL is tailored for SMBs that need serious bot protection now — not after a three-month procurement process, and not after hiring a security team

Tailored for SMBs

Built for businesses with no SOC, no full-time security engineer and no enterprise procurement cycle. Default policies are pre-configured, so you’re protected the moment you switch on

Enterprise-grade where it matters

Behavioural analysis, request and device fingerprinting, WAF, rate limiting, L7 DDoS mitigation and automated detection updates — in one layer

The same engine protecting 2.5 million+ websites across 30+ countries — tuned for small-business budgets and setup

No CAPTCHA by default

Real users stay on the buying path. Suspicious automation is handled before it reaches the application

Built to stay up

Multi-region deployment with automatic failover keeps your site online during traffic spikes and attacks

Clear dashboard and simple rules

See good vs bad traffic, top targets, threat sources and rule status without reading server logs.

Run a store, SaaS, marketplace, media or lead-gen site? The goal is simple: keep real customers moving, keep approved search engines crawling, and keep unwanted automation outside.

How it works

One filter in front of your website

Traffic passes through ADPAL before it ever reaches your origin — flagged behavior is blocked in milliseconds, without a rule to write

See the platform

Шаги

For your IT person: ADPAL is powered by the GateKeeper engine and runs as a reverse proxy. Detection combines behavioural analysis, device and request fingerprinting, signature matching, rate limiting and anomaly heuristics. The detection logic updates itself automatically — no lists to maintain, no rules to write from scratch.

Learn more: about the GateKeeper behind ADPAL or dive into the documentation

Scraping

AI crawler

Credential stuffing

Account Takeover

Search engine

Data Theft

Human

Carding

Fingerprinting

Bot Classification

DDoS Protection

Rate Limiting

AI Crawl Control

Human

Search engine

AI search

Human

.Features

Everything SMBs need to keep bots out

Advanced protection engine for SMBs

Advanced bot detection, WAF, rate limiting and L7 DDoS mitigation — without enterprise complexity

Invisible detection

No CAPTCHA for real customers — bots are scored and stopped before they touch your application

Unauthorised crawler control

Block or limit AI crawlers, unknown scrapers and content harvesters while keeping approved search bots safe. → /learn/ai-crawlers/

L7 DDoS mitigation

Application-layer floods are absorbed at the perimeter before they exhaust your server, checkout, login or API

Rule settings without code

Block by country, IP, ASN, path, user-agent or crawler type with toggles and presets

Speed is a bonus

Static and dynamic content caching offsets the extra proxy hop and speeds up heavy pages

Control of AI crawlers

Visibility and control for AI content scraping

AI crawlers can hit your pages thousands of times for every visitor they send back. See which ones are on your site, and decide who gets in

Take control of AI crawlers

See what’s crawling you

Know which AI crawlers hit your site, how often, and whether they respect your rules

Control them crawler by crawler

Allow, limit or block each one, per site, with a toggle

Keep the ones that bring traffic

Verified AI-search crawlers — OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Google, Apple — that cite and link your pages stay welcome, so you show up in AI answers. The training scrapers that only take can be blocked

No impostors

We verify a crawler by its user-agent and its published network, so anything spoofing an AI bot’s name to sneak in is turned away

Dashboard & rules

A dashboard your team can actually use

Most SMBs don’t need another log viewer. They need clear answers: how much traffic is human, what is being attacked, which crawlers are allowed, which rules are active, and whether the site is safer today than yesterday

Human, good-bot, suspicious-bot and blocked traffic — split side by side, in real time

Top attacked pages and endpoints: login, forms, checkout, search and API paths

Threat sources by country, network, IP range and crawler type

A timeline of security events with custom date filtering, plus 8 built-in traffic categories

A recommended next step when traffic changes: tighten a rule, allowlist a bot, rate-limit an endpoint or switch on a stricter mode

Rule settings without waiting for developers

Allow Google, Bing and approved monitoring tools
Block or limit unauthorised crawlers and AI scrapers
Rate-limit login, forms, checkout, search and APIs.
Block by country, ASN, IP range, path, user-agent or header.
Create emergency rules during an L7 DDoS spike — without touching application code.

Default mode works out of the box. Custom rules are there when your business needs them: a promotion, a launch, a login attack, a suspicious crawler spike or an application-layer DDoS event.

Use cases

Skewed analytics

Bots inflate your traffic and drag down your conversion rate on paper, so you end up deciding on fake numbers. Filter them out and your analytics finally show real customers

See all use cases

Account Takeover

Bots testing stolen passwords against customer logins

Web Scraping

Competitors, price scrapers and content harvesters copying pages at scale

Unauthorised AI crawlers

Crawlers using your content for AI training, AI answers or internal datasets without permission. → /learn/ai-crawlers/

L7 DDoS & resource exhaustion

Request floods that look like visits until your server, forms, checkout or API slows down

Fake Signups

Junk accounts polluting your user base, CRM and email lists

Form spam

Garbage flooding contact forms, lead forms and support queues

Inventory hoarding

Bots holding stock in carts so real buyers can’t check out

Payment fraud

Automated card testing that creates chargebacks, fees and risk reviews

BUYER’S CHECKLIST

How to choose bot protection
software: 8 questions

Comparing vendors? Ask these — of anyone, including us:

Does it detect by behaviour, not just IP lists?

Modern bots use residential IPs, real browsers and human-like patterns

Yes — behaviour + fingerprinting + anomaly heuristics

Does it work without CAPTCHAs?

Every puzzle can cost real conversions and still be bypassed by AI-assisted automation

Yes — invisible for real customers

Does it include L7 DDoS mitigation?

Application-layer floods hit the app, not just the network

Yes — stopped before origin

Can it control unauthorised crawlers?

AI crawlers and scrapers may ignore robots.txt; enforcement needs a technical gate

Yes — crawler policies and rules

Is the dashboard understandable?

SMBs need decisions, not raw security logs

Yes — clear traffic, threat and rule views

Can rules be changed without code?

Teams need to react during abuse without waiting for developers

Yes — presets and custom rule settings

Is it priced and built for SMBs?

Enterprise platforms often mean enterprise cost, onboarding and complexity

Yes — SMB-first, GateKeeper-powered

Is it GDPR-clean by design?

Security tooling should not create a new privacy burden

Yes — cookieless, EU residency, no visitor tracking

If a vendor can only answer these with “enterprise plan”, “custom project” or “ask security”, it may not be built for SMB reality

Deployment

CMS plugin

Point your DNS and you’re protected the same day — no plugin, no code, no server access. Every store path (checkout, cart, login) is covered. No server access needed

Cloud

Point your DNS and you’re protected the same day — no plugin, no code, no server access. Every store path (checkout, cart, login) is covered. No server access needed

Self-hosted

Point your DNS and you’re protected the same day — no plugin, no code, no server access. Every store path (checkout, cart, login) is covered. No server access needed

Works with:

WordPress

WooCommerce

MShopify

First step today (free): run a site scan — see your current bot load before changing anything.

Trust

Privacy-first and SEO-safe by design

The key differentiator against most US-based vendors

Visit the Trust Center

Cookieless protection No cookies, no persistent tracking, no consent-banner headaches

European data residency Traffic is processed in the EU — a clear answer for GDPR reviews

No visitor tracking Cookieless detection means no tracking cookies and no profiles of your customers

Good bots stay good Approved search engines and monitoring tools pass through, so protection never breaks crawling, indexing or uptime checks

Powered by GateKeeper. Trusted at serious scale

ADPAL is powered by GateKeeper technology protecting 2.5 million+ websites in 30+ countries. The same enterprise-grade engine that shields large hosting platforms now protects small and medium-sized businesses — at a price and setup model that fits.

See customer stories

< 50 ms decision time per request

2.5M+ websites protected by the underlying engine

SMB-first deployment: reverse proxy, cloud or self-hosted

30+ countries, with multi-region failover for high availability

Cookieless by architecture — no tracking cookies, no visitor profiles

FAQ