August 4, 2025 – Tech Desk: In a historic shift, automated bots have officially surpassed human activity online, now accounting for more than 50% of total global internet traffic, according to a new report by cybersecurity firm Imperva. The milestone highlights the increasing dominance of machine-driven interactions across websites, applications, and digital platforms.
The study, which analyzed data across thousands of websites worldwide, found that bots—both malicious and benign—accounted for 50.8% of total web traffic in the first half of 2025. This marks the first time in internet history that bots have overtaken humans in overall activity online.
🤖 The Breakdown: Good Bots vs. Bad Bots
Imperva’s report divides bots into two primary categories:
- Good Bots (17.5%): These include search engine crawlers, uptime monitors, SEO tools, and legitimate AI web services. These bots are generally beneficial, helping to index content and monitor performance.
- Bad Bots (33.3%): These include scrapers, spammers, credential stuffing bots, and advanced persistent bots that mimic human behavior. The rise in bad bots is particularly alarming for businesses, as they are used for DDoS attacks, data theft, ad fraud, and fake content generation.
The 33.3% share of malicious bot traffic represents a 5% increase from 2024, raising red flags across cybersecurity communities.
🌐 Why the Spike?
Several factors are contributing to this shift:
- Proliferation of Generative AI: Tools like GPT-based crawlers, AI content analyzers, and automation APIs are creating a surge in non-human internet interactions.
- Increased Use of Web Scrapers: As data becomes more valuable, bots are being deployed to extract information from websites at an industrial scale.
- Credential Theft and Fraud: More sophisticated bots now emulate human behavior, bypass CAPTCHAs, and launch large-scale attacks to steal user credentials.
🛡️ Growing Cybersecurity Risks
Cybersecurity experts warn that the growing bot traffic presents a serious threat to internet stability and user trust.
“Bots are no longer just a background nuisance. They’re actively shaping what we see, what we buy, and even how secure our information is online,” said Lisa Zhang, Director of Threat Intelligence at Imperva.
E-commerce, banking, media, and travel sectors are among the hardest hit, with bots inflating traffic analytics, scraping competitive pricing data, and launching account takeover (ATO) attacks.
📉 Impact on Human Users and Businesses
For businesses, the increase in bot traffic translates to higher server costs, skewed analytics, and weakened customer experiences. Websites must now invest in advanced bot detection and mitigation strategies, such as behavior-based filtering, browser fingerprinting, and AI-driven firewalls.
From a user perspective, the bot boom may also mean more fake engagement, misleading content, and slower website performance.
🔮 What’s Next?
As AI and automation technologies continue to evolve, experts predict bots could account for 60% or more of all internet traffic by 2027, unless aggressive countermeasures are implemented.
“This tipping point should serve as a wake-up call,” Zhang added. “The future of the internet will be shaped not just by people—but by programs. And we need to be ready.”
