- In 2024, 51% of all internet traffic fell on bots, Thales report claims
- Not all bots are malicious, but many are
- Travel and retail industries are particularly hit
Bots, automated programs that run tasks over the internet, are now taking up more than half of all internet traffic, new research has claimed.
The 2025 Imperva Bad Bot Report found this was the first time in a decade that 51% of all web traffic constituted bot traffic, attributing the shift largely to the rise of Artificial intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLM).
The Imperva report focuses, first and foremost, on bad bots. It argues that travel and retail sectors face an “advanced bot problem”, where bad bots make up 41% and 59% of all traffic, respectively. In 2024, the travel industry was the most attacked sector with 27% of all bot attacks (up from 21% the year prior).
Bad bots
With the proliferation of Generative AI, things are only going to get worse, Imperva further states. ByteSpider Bot alone is apparently responsible for more than half (54%) of all AI-enabled attacks. Other significant contributors include AppleBot (26%), ClaudeBot (13%), and ChatGPT User Bot (6%).
Not all bot traffic is malicious, though. There are many useful, and often essential bots, such as search engine crawlers, monitoring bots, social media bots, or data scraping bots. They are used to index websites for search engines, check websites for performance or downtime, schedule posts or respond automatically, or to aggregate sites and scrape valuable data.
Still, bad bots take up a hefty portion of all bot traffic, presenting a real challenge for the cybersecurity community.
These tools, whose popularity exploded roughly three years ago with the introduction of Chat-GPT, have simplified the creation and scaling of malicious bots, Imperva noted.
“As AI tools become more accessible, cyber criminals are increasingly leveraging these technologies to create and deploy malicious bots which now account for 37% of all internet traffic – a significant increase from 32% in 2023,” the company explained.
“This is the sixth consecutive year of growth in bad bot activity, posing security challenges for organizations striving to safeguard their digital assets.”
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