Full Article (Opening–Body–Closing, Editorial Style) There’s a quiet rhythm to how we surf the web — a swipe here, a click there, pages loading with information both earnest and trivial. Yet beneath this familiar flow lies a world of unseen digital motion, where automated programs hum and churn in a constant stream of activity that most users barely acknowledge. In 2024, according to the latest Imperva Bad Bot Report, that hidden world grew startlingly large: malicious, AI‑driven bots made up more than a third of global internet traffic, accounting for nearly 37 percent of all online activity.
The Imperva report, compiled by the cybersecurity firm and published in April 2025, examined traffic patterns across the internet and found that automated entities — collectively known as bots — had overtaken human‑generated traffic for the first time in a decade. Bots in total comprised roughly half of all web traffic in 2024, and of that automated activity, bad bots — those created for malicious purposes — represented a significant 37 percent slice of the digital landscape, up sharply from previous years.
What drives this surge? Imperva and other analysts point to the rise of artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs), which have dramatically lowered the technical barriers to creating and deploying bots at scale. With access to advanced AI tools, cybercriminals — and sometimes less‑skilled attackers — can generate, refine, and automate bots that scrape data, perform credential stuffing, execute fraud, or carry out distributed denial‑of‑service attacks with minimal manual oversight.
These AI‑enhanced bots don’t just churn through pages in simple loops; many are designed to emulate human behavior, evade detection, and adapt their tactics over time. Advanced bots increasingly exploit web APIs, which serve as gateways for mobile apps and cloud services, making API endpoints a prime target for malicious traffic. The result is a digital ecosystem in which bots, both simple and sophisticated, operate below the surface of everyday browsing, often unseen yet deeply influential.
The implications of this shift are far‑reaching. For businesses, bad bot traffic can inflate server costs, distort analytics, steal data, and disrupt online services, requiring costly cybersecurity measures to mitigate damage. For users, the sheer volume of automated activity can degrade quality of service, contribute to fraudulent transactions, and muddy the distinction between genuine human interaction and artificial engagement. Cybersecurity professionals warn that as bot traffic continues to grow, organizations must invest in adaptive defenses and real‑time monitoring to differentiate between benign automation and harmful attacks.
Yet the story is not one of doom alone. Awareness of the scale and nature of bot traffic is driving innovation in detection — from behavioral fingerprinting to AI‑enhanced threat response — in an ongoing effort to preserve the integrity of human online experience. As we move forward, understanding the interplay between human users and automated agents will remain critical in ensuring that the web remains a space shaped more by people than by programmed shadows.
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Sources Imperva’s 2025 Bad Bot Report and supporting cybersecurity analyses on bot traffic composition.