Bots Now Account for Half of Global Web Traffic

There is a 51 percent chance that whoever is reading this isn’t a real person.

Published 4 months ago in Facepalm

According to the cybersecurity firm Imperva, 51 percent of all global web traffic is the byproduct of A.I.-powered bots. Due to the rise of LLM tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, the rise in bot traffic has increased dramatically since 2013, when the firm first started tracking such data.

Bots now account for over half of global internet traffic, per FORTUNE
— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) July 31, 2025

The implications are wide-ranging but are most detrimental to “financial services, healthcare and e-commerce,” according to The Independent. The most common function of large-scale bot armies is to perform DDoS attacks (distributed denial of service) directed at online services such as medical care and banks, as well as orchestrated spamming campaigns on sites like X and Facebook.

If you’re like me and have spent the majority of your time online, you’ve known this to be true for some time. During Elon’s early days as Twitter’s Shitposter in Chief, he was very outspoken about Twitter’s “bot problem,” which at the time people scoffed at but which has only gotten worse in the years since.