The Internet is full of bots

Research has revealed that almost half of the Internet’s total traffic is generated by bots rather than human users.

According to research conducted by Imperva as a part of its 2024 Bad Bot Report, automated agents represented 49.6% of total Internet traffic in 2023.

This is a 2% jump over 2022 and the highest level Imperva has reported since it began monitoring automated traffic in 2013.

Additionally, the research determined that bad bots contributed a third of all traffic. These bots carry out malicious activities such as transaction fraud, web scraping, and data harvesting.

These statistics are more notable when considering the number of human users making up the other 50.4% of the traffic.

According to the World Bank’s Digital Progress and Trends Report 2023, two-thirds of the world’s population — around 5.3 billion people — has access to the Internet.

Additionally, research by Edge Delta found that in 2023, the world generated 120 zettabytes of data over the year. This means the bots produce almost as much data as two-thirds of the world’s population.

These results also lend some weight to the Dead Internet Theory and its concerns around botting.

The Dead Internet Theory is a conspiracy theory stating that most online activity consists of bots and automated content generation rather than humans.

According to this theory, algorithmic curators manipulate human users — with hardline supporters believing these bots were created specifically to control people through subtle manipulation.

Although parts of the theory are outlandish, research conducted by Barracuda shows that malicious bots are increasingly targeting the Internet.

Barracuda’s 2024 data shows that bad bots make up 24% of Internet traffic — down from 39% in 2021 and 30% in 2023.

These findings are also supported by Cloudflare Radar’s data, which found that the split between human and bot traffic for 2024 was 70% to 30%, respectively.

It should be noted that these are global statistics. For South Africa, Cloudflare Radar determined that the split between human and bot traffic was 82% to 18%.

At face value, this is a positive trend, but deeper analysis revealed that while the number of bad bots is decreasing, the proportion of unique individual bad bots is increasing.

This means that due to the advances in threat detection and other security measures, bad actors have adopted a quality-over-quantity approach to botting by employing advanced bots capable of mimicking human behaviours and navigating complex web interactions.

Barracuda found that between September 2023 and August 2024, the number of these advanced bots increased from 36% to 44% — this tracking was done by measuring individual clients.

Additionally, advanced bots made up 49% of all bot traffic despite being fewer in number relative to other non-human traffic.

Advances in AI technology have also assisted in the evolution of advanced bots, allowing for greater adaptability and flexibility.

However, this is not to say that all bot activity is bad, as a large portion of traffic online is generated by tools designed to assist users — with Barracuda finding that good bots and similar tools comprised 42% of total bot traffic.

These include tools such as search engine, social media agent, crawler/indexer, and feed-fetcher bots — each offering utility for users.

AI has also benefited these good bots and is helping to create and improve countermeasures against the emerging advanced bots.