- Automated bots now account for over half of global internet traffic, with malicious bots close to 40%
- AI-powered bot attacks increase more than twelvefold by 2025, blurring the lines between legitimate automation and abuse
- A growing share of attacks are targeting APIs, with financial services seeing nearly half of last year’s account takeovers
It’s been a few years since automated bot activity took up the majority of global web traffic, but “bad bots” are taking an ever-larger slice of that pie, and with AI agents being thrown into the mix, the problem is only getting more complex.
A new report on bot activity, harvested from Thales’ Threat Research and Security Analyst Services teams over 2025, found that automated activity now represents more than 53% of all internet traffic, with the remaining 47% falling on human interaction.
Bad bots, on the other hand, now account for nearly 40% of all global web traffic.
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Blurring the lines
AI-powered bot attacks have increased 12.5 times over the past year, Thales added. These developments have moved beyond simple credential-filling or price-scraping scripts and turned bots into sophisticated devices that can mimic human behavior with alarming precision.
These “AI agents” are now in a category of their own, interacting directly with applications and APIs to perform complex tasks.
As such, they are increasingly blurring the lines between legitimate business automation and malicious intent.
“AI is transforming automation from something organizations try to block to something they must also manage,” said Tim Chang, Global Vice President and General Manager, Application Security at Thales.
“The challenge is no longer identifying bots. It’s understanding what the bot, agent, or automation is doing, whether it aligns with business intent, and how it interacts with critical systems.”
A significant portion of this malicious activity (around 27%) is now targeting APIs specifically. Bypassing traditional user interfaces, bots can interact with backend systems at machine speed, exploit business logic, and manipulate workflows. The trend is apparently most evident in the financial sector, where 46% of all account takeover incidents occurred last year.
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