Automated traffic is growing 8x faster than human traffic: Report

Automated site visitors grew 23.5% 12 months over 12 months in 2025 — about eight occasions quicker than human site visitors, which rose 3.1%, in line with HUMAN Safety’s State of AI Visitors report.

• AI-driven site visitors seems to be a serious contributor to that development, with common month-to-month quantity rising 187% 12 months over 12 months, whereas site visitors from AI brokers and agentic browsers (e.g., OpenAI’s Atlas, Perplexity’s Comet) grew almost 8,000% 12 months over 12 months.
• Automated site visitors is outlined within the report as: “All web site visitors generated by software program techniques relatively than human customers, together with conventional automation resembling search engine crawlers, monitoring bots, and standard scraping instruments, in addition to AI-driven site visitors.”
• This report follows Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince’s prediction that bots could overtake human web usage by 2027.

Why we care. Search is more and more formed by greater than human queries, crawling, and indexing. AI brokers now take part in discovery, comparability, and transactions — inside Google’s evolving outcomes and throughout AI-driven interfaces.

The main points. HUMAN teams AI-driven site visitors into three broad classes:

• Coaching crawlers gathering information for fashions. They nonetheless dominate at 67.5% of AI site visitors, however their share is declining as scrapers and brokers scale.
• Actual-time scrapers that feed AI search and solutions. Scraper site visitors grew almost 600% in 2025, pushed by AI-powered search and real-time reply engines.
• Agentic AI techniques that execute duties autonomously. Smaller in share, however rising quickest and most disruptive.

AI brokers behave extra like customers. These techniques aren’t restricted to studying content material. They more and more navigate funnels, log in, and transact. In 2025:

• 77% of noticed agent exercise (requests) occurred on product and search pages.
• Almost 9% touched account-level interactions.
• Greater than 2% reached checkout flows.

Concerning the information. HUMAN analyzed multiple quadrillion interactions (requests/occasions) throughout its buyer base in 2025, with aggregated, anonymized information from 2022 to 2025. It labeled AI-driven site visitors into coaching crawlers, AI scrapers, and agentic AI utilizing user-agent strings, infrastructure alerts, and noticed habits, noting limits in self-declared bot id, which can undercount or misclassify some AI-driven exercise.

Backside line. Visitors is changing into much less purely human, and discovery is now not confined to search engines like google and yahoo. Optimization now means deciding which machines can entry, interpret, and act in your content material.

The report. The 2026 State of AI Traffic & Cyberthreat Benchmark Report