Definition

Bot detection

Bot detection covers TLS and browser fingerprinting, behavioural analysis, IP reputation and challenge pages, all used by answer engines to distinguish automated requests from human sessions.

Detection strength varies by engine: Copilot is comparatively permissive, ChatGPT sits behind aggressive Cloudflare protection, and the Chinese engines add account-level risk on top.

Cost per successful sample is mostly a function of detection strength, which is why per-engine pricing differs rather than being flat.

Nostimates measures bot detection across twelve AI answer surfaces. Request access →

All terms

AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)AI Overviews AI Mode Citation share n-sampling Query fan-out Grounding Share of voice (AI)Extraction success rate Surface Answer engine Citation Brand mention Mention rate Confidence interval Statistical significance Citation volatility Non-determinism Reproducibility Identity-free collection Personalisation Locale Residential proxy Collection cost Credit Evidence retention Audit trail Parser version Canary prompt Data freshness Cadence Prompt set Head term Long-tail query Competitive set llms.txt robots.txt AI crawler Training crawler Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)Hallucination Answer box Featured snippet Zero-click search Entity Entity salience Knowledge graph Structured data JSON-LD schema.org FAQ schema Answer-first content Chunk Embedding Semantic search Prompt injection Market coverage Sentiment analysis Position tracking White-label data