I keep talking about how bots are taking over the internet and I often get some befuddled looks 🤨
Bots are kinda abstract. Are they good? Are they bad?
What’s a bot have to do with me?
This graph shows just one instance of a bot attack on a site that we manage. The blue line at the bottom shows normal web traffic and the orange line shows a bot attack that was stopped by Cloudflare (a software that helps prevent unwanted traffic from reaching your site).
In this case, this bot wasn’t doing anything harmful. It was just looking for information on the site and unintentionally overloading the server. But if you don’t have software like this to protect your site, your site would crash and be unreachable until the bot got bored and moved on… 🫠
As AI tools become more common, this kind of traffic is going to keep growing. It used to be a problem for enterprise sites, and now it’s trickling down to everyone else as the ability to create bots becomes accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
In 2023, bot traffic on the internet was 49.6%.
Then in 2024, it increased to 51%. There were officially more bots browsing the internet than people.
Halfway into 2026 and bot traffic has jumped to roughly 57.5% of the all internet traffic.
That number is going to keep climbing. The internet is quietly changing from a place built for people to a place navigated by bots.
Businesses that recognize that shift today will be much better prepared for whatever comes next.
- Filed Under Field Notes
