Case Study: Future PLC protects content and stops bot abuse with ShieldSquare

Top Digital Content and Commerce Company Entrusts ShieldSquare to Safeguard Web Content

Future PLC, a digital content and commerce company serving more than 100 million consumers monthly, needed to protect its high-value editorial content and forums from bots. Competitors were scraping product reviews and buying guides, while fake bot-generated comments were polluting discussion areas and hurting user experience and advertiser value. Future PLC turned to ShieldSquare to address content scraping and spam comments.

ShieldSquare’s cloud, API-based bot protection solution was integrated across key sites in monitor and active modes to identify malicious bots using techniques like device fingerprinting, IP tracking, and Turing tests. The result was zero false positives, improved search engine crawling, no impact on site performance, and fewer complaints from users. Future PLC also reported that 1.5 million CAPTCHAs were shown with only 2 solved, and server infrastructure costs dropped as bot traffic was reduced significantly.

Future PLC

John Potter

Former Chief Technology Officer