Bots games don't count and get deleted ...

I played 3 bot games on my pc, neither of which increased my ELO-rating, then what's the motivation to play them in the first place?

Plus, I recently played a bot game on my phone against a higher-ranked player ... and it's gone.  It's nor on my phone, nor on my pc.

Do you have to explicitly hit Save Game for it not to be deleted?

And the only way to increase your rating is through playing puzzles or real players?

I find that quite ridiculous IMO.

Why don't these count towards your rating?

Games against the computer are not rated and are not kept unless you manually save them. At one point running a Game Review would save them, but don't know if that's still the case.

The site used to have bots in live with rated play, but removed it. 

They used to. There are a lot of practical problems with making bot games rated though. For example in the past people would find an opening trap that the bot would blunder into. Even if it only worked 1 out of 4 games, an 800 player could play it over and over against a 2000 bot to inflate their rating to 1800, for example.

As long as you set the side to random, choose a time control for a standard game, and set none of the options, you'll get a game that you can run game review on, and that will show up in your completed games list.

Practice

Well in that particular game I only l lost one pawn (and the bot was higher ranked) so I was quite pleased with it overall.  And now it's gone ... kind of sucks.

So now I only increase my rating by playing puzzles, I take it they get harder as your rating increases.

And you have a diamond membership. I think you can quickly go up in the puzzle's rating

If you hit Play then Archive, you should see all your bot games..

It'd be handy if you could set an option for games to be auto-saved.  Yeah I'm gold and want to get better, only thing is I can't play with a clock.  But I guess others dislike this feature as well for online play later in.  I'm an anti-blitz player. 😎  Still have ADHD though, go figure ...

Puzzles are getting weird now though, mate isn't the goal any more most times and if you don't do the perfect move you get penalized.

Hello, I played a game against the new bot "Luk.AI". I played a brilliant move, the second I have gotten on chess.com, the first on this account. It was played on the chess.com app, but I cannot access it anymore. The worst was that I only got one mistake (a blunder) every other move was near perfect. After retries, 92% accuracy. Is there anything I can do to save it? I reviewed the game, but it did not save it. I still remember all the moves, but I want it to show up on chess.com that I have obtained two brilliant moves.

If you're on Android, you would have needed to manually save it after the game. If you didn't it's gone.  I don't know if iOS has a save option yet in bot games.

Playing bots is simply to waste time