The Bot Market

What's Real Traffic?

The internet's founding assumption—that a human sits on the other side of the screen—has been quietly invalidated.

Over the last few years, the internet changed faster than many people's mental model of it, as the data below shows. Though the challenges are accelerating, so too are the tools and opportunities to handle them.

The Bargain Is Over

History was written — or at least indexed — by the crawlers. Before the generative AI era, bots made up roughly 20% of web traffic, with Google’s crawler as the single largest source. These automated programs scraped the web so that humans, eventually, could search it. Publishers got a click out of the deal. That deal is largely over.

Automated traffic has grown nearly eight times faster than human traffic. HUMAN Security analyzed over one quadrillion digital interactions and found AI-driven traffic surged 187% in 2025 alone.

Sources: Imperva Bad Bot Reports (2014–2025), HUMAN Security 2026 Benchmark Report. Composite series from annual reports; methodology varies by year. Good bots include search crawlers and monitoring tools. Bad bots include scrapers, scalpers, and credential stuffers.

By late 2024, AI-generated articles began matching human output in volume, according to Graphite's analysis of 65,000 English-language articles. Bots are writing the internet and reading it.

Source: Graphite, “More Articles Are Now Created by AI Than Humans” (Oct 2025), analysis of 65,000 English-language articles via Common Crawl, Jan 2020–May 2025. Quarterly values interpolated between Graphite’s published inflection points: ChatGPT launch (Nov 2022), 39% at 12 months post-launch (Nov 2023), plateau onset (May 2024), 50.3% crossover (Nov 2024).

Source: HUMAN Security, “2026 State of AI Traffic & Cyberthreat Benchmark Report,” March 26, 2026.

It’s behavior as well as volume. Roughly 76% of bot traffic now evades standard detection, making it harder for regular websites to detect. And the bots that are increasingly getting through aren’t cheap visitors: AI crawlers can consume up to 70% of a site’s dynamic server resources, hitting the expensive endpoints humans rarely touch.

For context, the web has been machine-mediated almost since the beginning: Google’s algorithm decided where the human-to-human search went—a publisher, store, service, or business. Bots scrape pages, algorithms rank them, humans click, and sites run by people monetize. Generative AI is breaking that arrangement by removing the click—keeping the machines in the middle but no longer sending people to the sites that feed them. At the same time, human traffic is declining and bot traffic is increasing, making it harder to find the audience that remains.

A Two-Front Problem

For retail, it's the best of times, and the worst.

The Hostile Side

120 million AI scraper requests in one quarter. Competitors are able to monitor product pricing in real time and adjust instantly.

Scalper bots can destroy launch economics. One collectible drop saw 3,160 bot checkouts—70% from a single retailer, run by just two reseller groups (Kasada, Q2 2025 Bot Attack Trends Report).

Sources: Akamai / Surebright, Cyber Week 2024–2025. 2025 figure: 11.8 billion bot-related requests on Black Friday alone, up 79% YoY.

The Opportunity Side

Not all new bot traffic is hostile. AI-referred shoppers convert better than non-AI traffic sources.

Source: Adobe Analytics, 2025 holiday season data (Nov. 1–Dec. 31). AI-referred = visitors arriving via ChatGPT, Perplexity, and similar AI platforms.

The Search Traffic Collapse

Google is answering more queries itself, so fewer clicks even leave the search page. The traffic that does leave goes disproportionately to the biggest sites. And AI referrals, while growing fast, aren’t yet close to replacing what’s being lost.

Sources: SparkToro/Jumpshot (2019); SparkToro/Similarweb (2024, 332M queries, Jan 2023–Sep 2024); Similarweb/SE Roundtable (2025). *2025 figure (69%) is for news queries specifically, post-AI Overviews rollout (56%→69%, May 2024–May 2025). The overall zero-click rate as of 2024 was 58.5%.

In 2019, half of Google searches ended without a click. By 2025, it’s closer to seven in ten. AI Overviews, live in 200+ countries, answer the question before anyone visits a website.

Source: Chartbeat / Axios, March 2026. Decline measured over two years (2023–2025). Publisher size by daily page views: Small (1K–10K), Medium (10K–100K), Large (100K+).

The trend has hit publishers differently: small sites lost 60% of their search traffic in two years. Large publishers lost roughly a third of that—22%. The gap isn’t random. Google’s 2023–2025 core updates and the Helpful Content Update systematically rewarded big-brand authority signals, while AI Overviews surface answers from the same trusted sources. Independent sites like HouseFresh and Retro Dodo publicly documented losing 60–90% of their traffic almost overnight. Large publishers also have something small sites can’t access: direct licensing deals with Google, OpenAI, and others.

Source: Chartbeat, 2025. Search referrals (Google Search + Discover) fell 34%, but total page views fell only 6%—other channels partially offset the loss, but not fully.

Direct visits, social, and newsletters are partially offsetting the loss—but the most search-dependent sites don’t have those channels built yet.

Sources: DemandSage / Similarweb / Conductor, 2025–2026. AI chatbots (ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc.) now account for ~1% of total web traffic (Conductor, 3.3B sessions), up +357% YoY (Similarweb).

Sources: Similarweb, 2025 Generative AI Report; TechCrunch, July 2025. Jun 2024 figure back-calculated from +357% YoY. Sep 2025 from Similarweb annual report (+778% YoY). Only published data points shown; quarterly breakdowns are not available.

A Capability Adjustment

Hiring is shifting to match the rise in web automation. The skills chart shows which capabilities employers are chasing to meet this demand.

Sources: Indeed Hiring Lab, “AI at Work: Rise of the GenAI Consultant,” Feb 2025 (GenAI +170%, Jan 2024→Jan 2025); Robert Half, 2026 Technology Hiring Report (AI/ML & Data Science +163%, Cybersecurity +124%, YoY job posting counts).

With automation and AI capabilities growing fastest, the training gap is showing up in returns. Organizations with mature, organization-wide upskilling programs report significant positive AI ROI at twice the overall rate—42% vs. the 21% baseline.

Source: DataCamp / YouGov, 2026 State of Data & AI Literacy Report. 517 U.S. and UK enterprise leaders surveyed.

Strategies for the Synthetic Web

Conclusion

The assumption that a human is on the other side of the screen no longer holds. Trend lines are converging in the same direction.

Composite of sources cited throughout this report. Bot share: Imperva annual reports. Zero-click: SparkToro/Similarweb (only 2024 and 2025 data points are published; shown as dashed line). AI content: Graphite/Axios (interpolated from endpoint data).

There has been a quiet, structural shift: bots now account for the majority of web traffic, and AI-generated content is approaching parity with human output, at least in volume. Search-driven traffic models are declining. As companies adapt — hiring for both security and automation — those that also invest in training are more likely to see ROI.