- By 2024, 51% of all internet traffic fell on bots, allegations
- Not all bots are malicious but many are
- Travel and retail industries are especially affected
Bots, automated programs that operate tasks over the Internet, are now taking up more than half of all internet traffic, new research has claimed.
The bad bot report from 2025 found that this was the first time in a decade, that 51% of all web traffic amounted to bot traffic attributing to the change largely to the increase in artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLM).
The Imperva report focuses first and foremost on bad bots. It claims that travel and retail sectors are facing an “advanced bot problem”, where bad bots make up 41% and 59% of all traffic respectively. By 2024, the travel industry was the most attacked sector with 27% of all bot attacks (up from 21% the year before).
Bad bots
With the spread of generative AI, things will only get worse, opaque states further. Bottom spider bot is apparently responsible for more than half (54%) of all AI-activated attacks. Other significant contributors include Applebot (26%), claudebot (13%) and chatgpt -user bot (6%).
However, not all bot traffic is malicious. There are many useful and often important bots, such as search engine -crawlers, monitoring of bots, bots on social media or data scraping bots. They are used to index sites for search engines, check websites for performance or downtime, schedule posts or respond automatically, or to collect sites and scrape valuable data.
Still, bad bots take a huge part of all bot traffic and pose a real challenge for the cyber security community.
These tools whose popularity exploded for approx. Three years ago with the introduction of Chat-GPT, has simplified the creation and scaling of malicious bots, noted imperva.
“As AI tools become more accessible, cyber criminals are increasingly utilizing these technologies to create and insert malicious bots that now account for 37% of all internet traffic – a significant increase from 32% by 2023,” the company explained.
“This is the sixth consecutive year with growth in poor bot activity that constitutes security challenges for organizations that strive to protect their digital assets.”
