Bots Surpass Humans in Global Web Traffic for the First Time in Internet History

The report summarizes data showing that automated bots have overtaken human users in global web traffic (e.g., 57.5% globally, 71.5% in the U.S.), cites corroborating figures from Cloudflare and Imperva, notes that AI-driven crawling surged in 2025, highlights that a sizable portion of bot traffic (37%) is malicious, and outlines resulting impacts on analytics, monetization, and emerging countermeasures such as pay-to-crawl and defaults to block AI crawlers.