• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 18, 2017

Distil Networks, which focuses on bot detection, announced Thursday the acquisition of Are You A Human, a company with technology that analyzes how real humans interact with the Internet.

The company will integrate Are You A Human's real-time human detection technology and biometric interaction with Distil Bot Defense Platform, adding biometric and longitudinal data from millions of new sites and users.

Distil also released a free product called Distil Bot Discovery for Google Analytics, a free plugin that uses Are You A Human technology. It integrates with Google Analytics to find and filter bot traffic.

The company estimates that Google's bot filtering only catches 1% of bot traffic that hits most sites, which means that every A/B test, every conversion metric, every traffic analysis is skewed by bad bot data.

Distil’s free offering is designed to remove the bad data created by bots, which is used by competitors, hackers and fraudsters -- the key culprits behind Web scraping, brute force attacks, competitive data mining, online fraud, account hijacking, data theft, spam, digital ad fraud and downtime, according to the company.

Reid Tatoris, co-founder and chief product officer of Are You A Human, which reportedly supports companies like Reuters, Staples and StubHub among its clients, said the company chose to join the Distil Networks team because the two companies share the same mission.

The acquisition of Are You A Human brings in a team of experienced software engineers and data scientists who have dedicated the past seven years to understanding the online bot problem.