While humans built the internet, actual people aren’t the ones roaming the online space the most. A new report from Thales says bots accounted for more than 53% of all web traffic in 2025, up from 51% the previous year. Meanwhile, human activity has fallen by 47%, which means automated traffic has now become the dominant force online. And that’s not even the bad news.
How AI is making the bot problem worse
The big jump in bots on the internet is largely driven by AI-driven automation. According to the 2026 Thales Bad Bot report, 40% of all web traffic is malicious bot activity, with AI bot attacks surging 12.5 times compared to the previous year. These AI agents are reportedly emerging as a third category of web traffic, sitting alongside the traditional “good” and “bad” bots. These agents can even interact with apps and APIs, pull data, and perform tasks in ways that may look legitimate from the outside.
In other words, the problem is no longer just spotting whether something is automated. Security teams now have to figure out what that automation is trying to do. Thales says 27% of bot attacks now target APIs, skipping the front-end interface and interacting directly with backend systems at machine speed. Financial services were hit particularly hard, accounting for 24% of all bot attacks and 46% of account takeover incidents
The web is becoming machine-driven
Not all bots are bad, with a lot of them being used as search crawlers, monitoring tools, accessibility services, and legitimate AI agents. The issue is that automation has become so widespread that old security models are starting to strain.
It also makes the classic “dead internet theory” feel a little less ridiculous than it used to. For those unaware, the theory basically argues that much of the web is no longer driven by real human activity, but by bots, algorithms, synthetic content, and automated engagement loops. It has always been more internet folklore than proven reality, but the latest Thales numbers give the idea an uncomfortable new edge.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean the internet is fake or that humans have disappeared from it. But when bots account for more than half of web traffic, and malicious bots alone make up a huge chunk of that activity, the signs get harder to ignore how much of the modern web is shaped by machines.
