BBC

Bot Traffic Overtakes Human Traffic in 2024 as AI Agents and Scrapers Surge

Analysis of internet traffic from 2013 to 2026 shows automated bots steadily eroding human dominance online. Imperva data reveals human traffic fell to 47 percent by 2025 while malicious bots reached 40 percent. Good bots such as search crawlers remain stable, but gray AI agents and scrapers now drive much of the growth. Companies face rising infrastructure costs from bot traffic that generates no revenue, described as an invisible tax. Cloudflare and Akamai reports confirm high volumes of automated requests, with many classified as harmful scraping. The trend raises concerns about a synthetic internet shaped more by AI recommendations than human activity.