As Kungen already answered - stats! You can sell bot traffic as real traffic which inflates your numbers.
For stuff like social media, bots increase engagement too. Many new products and networks actually generate a lot of fake content to attract organic growth. I.e. if bot likes your comment you’re likely to engage more. If it likes your product review you’re likely to review more stuff etc.
Tracking bots can also generate reverse analytics. For example if you know that your competitors are scraping fishing equipment data from your store it could mean they’re working on a competing fishing related product.
Lastly, you can feed fake data to bots to manipulate competitors. This is somewhat illegal (no real legal precedent yet afaik though its a clear intent to harm other businesses) but it can really powerful in the wrong hands.
Edit: worth nothing that a lot of bot traffic is good. Sometimes you want to be scraped as it is a form of organic engagement and increases the value of your data and often backlinks growth (e.g. indexers like Google etc)
Enough updoots or retweets and other algos pick up on it. Some random twitter discussion ends up on BuzzFeed, YTers start making influencer vids, and Reddit / Lemmy repost bots.
Do this enough and it’ll gain traction. Now everyone is talking about your stupid fuckin Stanley mug, corporate rumor,or political talking point.
And this can be automated end to end, 24/7, by market and keyword, will real time feedback as to how well it’s doing via upvotes, shares, likes, or even data mining emails and convos via Gmail or WhatsApp.
I’ll ask anyway. Why do companies like bots?
As Kungen already answered - stats! You can sell bot traffic as real traffic which inflates your numbers.
For stuff like social media, bots increase engagement too. Many new products and networks actually generate a lot of fake content to attract organic growth. I.e. if bot likes your comment you’re likely to engage more. If it likes your product review you’re likely to review more stuff etc.
Tracking bots can also generate reverse analytics. For example if you know that your competitors are scraping fishing equipment data from your store it could mean they’re working on a competing fishing related product.
Lastly, you can feed fake data to bots to manipulate competitors. This is somewhat illegal (no real legal precedent yet afaik though its a clear intent to harm other businesses) but it can really powerful in the wrong hands.
Edit: worth nothing that a lot of bot traffic is good. Sometimes you want to be scraped as it is a form of organic engagement and increases the value of your data and often backlinks growth (e.g. indexers like Google etc)
More eyeballs.
Enough updoots or retweets and other algos pick up on it. Some random twitter discussion ends up on BuzzFeed, YTers start making influencer vids, and Reddit / Lemmy repost bots.
Do this enough and it’ll gain traction. Now everyone is talking about your stupid fuckin Stanley mug, corporate rumor,or political talking point.
And this can be automated end to end, 24/7, by market and keyword, will real time feedback as to how well it’s doing via upvotes, shares, likes, or even data mining emails and convos via Gmail or WhatsApp.