Case Study: Leading Automotive Retailer stops bad bots and boosts site performance 25% with Distil Networks

Distil Networks Stops Bad Bots from Scraping Web Properties for Automotive Retailer

A national automotive retailer operating hundreds of stores and nearly 100 web properties faced severe site instability from malicious bots that scraped content (peaking at thousands of requests per second), caused frequent brownouts, and generated thousands of offending IPs. Manual blacklisting was an ineffective “whack‑a‑mole” approach that blocked legitimate traffic and consumed the equivalent of one full‑time employee to manage.

The company deployed Distil’s cloud CDN, quickly testing via DNS changes and then rolling the service across ~100 sites; Distil filters and caches traffic while passing original client IPs (via X‑Forwarded‑For) so monitoring still works. The result: bad bots are blocked while real customers get through, site performance improved ~25%, cached content now serves the vast majority of requests, and bot management time dropped to about 5% of one FTE.