AI Bots Have Overtaken Human Traffic Online, Report Finds

A new report from Human Security has found that bots and AI systems have officially surpassed human users as the dominant force on the internet, marking a fundamental shift in how online traffic is generated and consumed.

According to the State of AI Traffic report released Thursday, automated traffic—defined as "internet traffic generated by software systems (including AI) rather than human users"—has grown nearly eight times faster than human activity in 2025. This surge comes as people increasingly rely on AI chatbots for daily questions and tasks, fundamentally altering the composition of internet traffic.

The proliferation of large language models has been a major driver of this trend. Traffic from AI agents like OpenClaw, which perform actions autonomously for users, grew almost 8,000% in 2025 compared to the previous year. Meanwhile, overall AI traffic increased 187% from January to December 2025, fueled by popular services like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Google's Gemini.

"The internet as a whole was created with this very basic notion that there's a human being on the other side of the computer screen, and that notion is very rapidly being replaced," said Stu Solomon, CEO of Human Security, in an interview with CNBC.

Human's report was based on data from its Human Defense Platform product, which processed over one quadrillion interactions across its customers. However, the company acknowledges that quantifying automated activity across the entire internet presents challenges, as there isn't one complete database of interactions.

Filippo Menczer, a professor of Informatics and Computer Science at Indiana University, noted that estimates of bot traffic can be unreliable. "You can try to estimate the amount of bot traffic by looking at the agent strings, but these are very noisy estimates," Menczer told CNBC. "They depend on what sample you get. They are depending on where you're getting the data, where the measurements are coming from."

The report also highlights concerns about the reliability of user-agent strings—self-identified labels from web crawlers—as a method for identifying AI operators. While Human Security used these strings to identify AI operators, the report acknowledges that "the reliability of that self-identification is a growing concern."

Not all automated traffic is malicious or problematic. The report notes that popular features like Google's AI Overview and autofill contribute to automated traffic. "This notion of machine bad, human good just is not realistic," Solomon said. "You have to live in a world where machines are acting on our behalf, and we have to establish a level of trust that's persistent over time."

This trend aligns with broader industry observations. At the SXSW conference last week in Austin, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said that the internet was about 20% bot traffic prior to the generative AI era, mostly driven by Google's web crawler. Prince predicted that AI bots would exceed human traffic by 2027, citing "the rise of generative AI and its just insatiable need for data."

The findings represent a significant benchmark in the AI age of the internet, though the report isn't comprehensive. The industry has tracked the steady climb of automated traffic since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, and this new data suggests that the tipping point where bots overtake humans has already been reached.

As AI systems continue to evolve and become more integrated into daily online activities, the distinction between human and machine-generated traffic will likely become increasingly blurred, requiring new approaches to cybersecurity, content moderation, and digital infrastructure planning.