I just did an analysis of my web traffic to see how much of it came from valid potential purchasers of our products and services collectively and how much of the traffic came from some sort of automated mechanism - bots, robots, spiders, programming libraries, widgets and unidentified surfing objects.
60% of the traffic was from machines. Non-human beings. Non potential sources of income. Of course the search engines are helpful in getting traffic to us and some was our monitoring system, but 60%?? That is a lot of wasted bandwidth because not all those search engines are at all helpful. Some are actually malicious.