Friday, Jul 24, 2026 The claims desk. Receipts included. POWERED BY LENZ ↗
IsThis

TECH

The Claim

Automated bots account for more than 50% of global internet traffic.

Verified by Lenz ·

The Short Version

The claim is largely supported by Imperva/Thales' 2025 Bad Bot Report, which found automated bots made up 51% of global web traffic in 2024 — the first time bots surpassed humans. However, this figure comes from a single cybersecurity vendor with commercial incentives, and most sources citing it are echoing the same dataset rather than providing independent confirmation. The 50% threshold is crossed by just one percentage point, and the broad definition of "bots" includes legitimate crawlers and API calls, which may overstate the threat implied by the claim.

Caveats

  • The >50% figure originates from a single proprietary dataset (Imperva/Thales Bad Bot Report) — most supporting sources are downstream echoes, not independent measurements.
  • Imperva's definition of 'bot traffic' includes all automated activity such as legitimate crawlers, API calls, and monitoring tools, which inflates the figure beyond what most readers would consider malicious bots.
  • No peer-reviewed or government-level independent measurement corroborates the >50% threshold; the margin above 50% is just one percentage point.

The Receipts

  1. AI-Driven Bots Surpass Human Traffic - Bad Bot Report 2025 - Thales

    Thales

  2. AI Bots in Q2 2025: Trends from Fastly's Threat Insights Report

    Fastly

  3. Chart: Are Bad Bots Taking Over the Web? - Statista

    Statista

  4. The 2026 AI Bot Impact Report: Shared Hosting Risks & Solutions

    KNOWLEDGE_BASE

  5. Bots Overtake Humans: AI-Powered Traffic Now Dominates the Internet | IDM Magazine

    IDM Magazine

  6. How Much of Internet Traffic is Bots? | Anura

    Anura

  7. What Percentage of Web Traffic Is Generated by Bots in 2025? - ITGuys

    ITGuys

  8. Hi, robot: Half of all internet traffic now automated - Malwarebytes

    Malwarebytes

  9. What Cloudflare's Radar "2025 Year in Review" Tells Us About Internet Trends (AI Crawlers, Post-Quantum Adoption, DDoS Attacks) and What We Should Do in 2026 - The Cyber Skills

    The Cyber Skills

  10. AI-Driven Bots Surge In September 2025 - Equimedia

    Equimedia

+ 1 more sources — see the full list on Lenz

Filed Under

Bot TrafficInternet Traffic

More Fact Checks