Bot
Last Updated: July 29, 2026 | By Mihail Sebastian | AI Dictionary
An automated software program that performs tasks without step-by-step human direction, including web crawlers, trading bots, social bots, and chatbots.
What is a Bot?
A bot is a software program that performs automated tasks without step-by-step human direction, usually over a network. The word is an umbrella: web crawlers that index pages for search engines, trading bots that place orders, social media bots that post and reply, and chatbots that converse with customers are all bots.
Most bots contain no AI. A script that checks a price once a minute qualifies, and so does an LLM-driven assistant; what makes a program a bot is automation, not intelligence.
Types of Bots
- Web crawlers fetch pages, follow the links they find, and hand the content to a search index. Search engines run the best-known ones.
- Trading bots watch market data and execute orders against preset rules, at speeds no human trader matches.
- Social media bots run accounts automatically, from harmless news feeds to coordinated networks built to simulate grassroots opinion.
- Chatbots hold conversations with users. Every chatbot is a bot; few bots are chatbots.
The same automation serves abuse: malicious bots send spam, scrape data at scale, and run credential-stuffing attacks that try stolen passwords against thousands of login pages.
Example of a Bot
Googlebot, the crawler behind Google search, runs a simple loop at enormous scale. It requests a page from a web server, reads the HTML, extracts every link, and adds the new addresses to its queue of pages to visit. The page content goes to Google’s index so it can appear in search results.
Site owners steer the bot with a plain-text file called robots.txt, which lists what it may and may not visit. No person tells the crawler where to go next; the loop itself, repeated across billions of pages, is the whole job.
Related AI terms: Chatbot · Conversational AI · Robotic Process Automation · AI Agent
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Mihail Sebastian — Writes about AI governance, regulation, and the technology behind them. Placeholder bio — replace with a real credential line. About