Human or Bot? The Rise of Automated Internet Activity

Automated systems have officially surpassed human users as the dominant source of internet traffic, according to the State of AI Traffic report published by cybersecurity firm Human Security.

The report indicates that automated traffic, which Human Security defines as internet traffic generated by software systems and artificial intelligence rather than human users, grew nearly eight times faster than human activity throughout 2025.

This shift is largely driven by the proliferation of large language models, including Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Traffic associated with these models increased 187% between January and December 2025.

The growth of specific AI agents has been even more pronounced. Traffic from AI agents such as OpenClaw grew nearly 8,000% in 2025 compared to the previous year.

Categories of AI-Driven Traffic

The State of AI Traffic report categorizes automated interactions into three distinct types based on how the systems interact with websites.

• Training crawlers: These represent the largest portion of AI traffic at 67.5%, primarily collecting data to build and improve AI models.
• AI scrapers: Accounting for approximately 31.9% of traffic, these systems focus on extracting real-time data for AI assistants and search tools that require current information.
• Agentic AI: This smallest segment made up 1.7% of traffic by the end of 2025, though it is described as rapidly expanding.

The impact of this automated traffic is not evenly distributed across the web. The report notes that the highest concentrations of automated activity are found in the media, retail, and travel sectors.

The Structural Shift of the Internet

The dominance of machine-based traffic marks a fundamental change in the nature of online interaction. Stu Solomon, CEO of Human Security, noted that the internet was originally built on the assumption that a person was on the other side of the screen.

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

Stu Solomon, CEO of Human Security

Solomon stated that machine-based traffic is effectively replacing humans as the primary form of traffic on the internet.

Data Collection and Methodology

The findings are based on data from the Human Defense Platform, which Human Security states has processed more than one quadrillion interactions across its customer base.

Quantifying the exact amount of automated activity across the entire internet remains a technical challenge because no single, complete database of all interactions exists.

Filippo Menczer, a professor of Computer Science and Informatics at Indiana University, observed that estimating bot traffic by analyzing agent strings often results in noisy estimates.