Glossary · Detection & reputation
Honeypot
A trap planted for automation, a link or field invisible to humans, that flags anything which interacts with it as a bot.
A honeypot is bait. A site plants something only a program would touch, a link hidden with CSS, a form field positioned off-screen, a URL that no visible navigation leads to, and waits. A human never sees it, so a human never interacts with it. A crawler that blindly follows every link or fills every field walks straight in and identifies itself.
It is an elegant defence because it turns a bot's thoroughness against it. The more mechanically complete your automation, the more likely it is to trip a trap a person would never encounter, and once tripped, the address behind it is marked.
Avoiding honeypots is a matter of behaving selectively rather than exhaustively: respecting what is actually visible and navigable rather than hoovering up every link and field a page technically contains.
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