- Automated systems now generate more internet traffic than humans
- AI crawlers dominate data collection on most major online platforms
- Most automated traffic is concentrated in the retail, media and travel industries.
Bots have officially overtaken human users as the dominant source of internet traffic, according to a new study.
Human Sec’s State of AI Traffic report reveals that automated traffic grew nearly eight times faster than human activity in 2025.
“The Internet as a whole was created with this very basic notion that there is a human being on the other side of the computer screen, and that notion is very quickly being replaced,” said Stu Solomon, CEO of Human Security.
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Three categories of AI-driven traffic
The report divides AI-generated traffic into three distinct categories based on how automated systems interact with websites.
Training crawlers make up the largest share (67.5%), and these systems primarily collect data to create and improve AI models.
AI scrapers account for approximately 31.9% of traffic, focusing on extracting real-time data for search tools and AI assistants that need up-to-date information.
A small but rapidly expanding segment, known as agentic AI, accounted for just 1.7% at the end of 2025.
However, the latter category grew by almost 8,000% during the year thanks to its ability to act independently on websites.
One of the most notable changes is that AI tools are no longer limited to passively observing online content.
In 2025, approximately 77% of agent activity took place on product and search pages, with smaller but notable shares extending to account login flows, authentication steps, and even checkout pages.
This trend indicates a shift towards AI systems directly participating in online commerce rather than simply supporting it on the sidelines.
AI-driven traffic is also highly concentrated across industries and carriers.
More than 95% of all AI-generated traffic comes from just three industry sectors: retail and e-commerce, streaming and media, and travel and hospitality.
On the operator side, a small number of companies dominate the landscape, with OpenAI responsible for approximately 69% of observed AI chatbot traffic, followed by Meta and Anthropic.
This rapid growth creates security concerns because AI shopping assistants operate on the same login pages and payment systems that attackers target.
There is an increase in scraping attempts, account takeovers and fraudulent activity, meaning the gap between legitimate automation and malicious traffic is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish.
Nevertheless, the idea of AI traffic does not in itself mean disaster or malicious activity, since common features such as Google’s AI presentation and autofill are part of this traffic.
“This notion of machine bad and human good is just not realistic,” Solomon said.
“We must live in a world where machines act on our behalf, and we must establish a level of trust that persists over time. »
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