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TechRadar
TechRadar
Sead Fadilpašić

'The challenge is no longer identifying bots. It’s understanding what the bot, agent, or automation is doing': New report flags 40% of all internet traffic is now bad bots

Cloud, networking and internet.
  • Automated bots now account for over half of global internet traffic, with malicious bots nearing 40%
  • AI‑driven bot attacks surged more than twelvefold in 2025, blurring lines between legitimate automation and abuse
  • A growing share of attacks target APIs, with financial services seeing nearly half of last year’s account takeovers

It’s been a few years now since automated bot activity took up most of global web traffic, but “bad bots” are taking an ever-increasing share of that cake, and with AI agents being thrown into the mix, the problem is only getting more complex.

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