The internet is no longer primarily a human domain. A recent report from cybersecurity firm Human Security reveals that artificial intelligence and bots have officially surpassed human users in online activity. This dramatic shift signals a fundamental change in how we interact with and perceive the digital world.
“The internet was conceived with the fundamental assumption of a human being on the other side of the screen, and that assumption is rapidly becoming obsolete,” stated Stu Solomon, CEO of Human Security, in a recent interview. Automated traffic, defined as any internet activity generated by software systems, including AI, rather than humans, has seen an explosive increase, largely driven by the widespread adoption of AI chatbots for everyday tasks and information retrieval.
According to Human Security’s “State of AI Traffic” report, automated internet traffic expanded nearly eightfold faster than human activity in 2025. The proliferation of advanced large language models (LLMs) from companies like OpenAI (ChatGPT), Anthropic (Claude), and Google (Gemini) has been a significant catalyst for this surge in AI-driven traffic. The report indicates that AI traffic alone saw a remarkable 187% increase between January and December 2025.
“Machine-generated traffic is effectively supplanting humans as the dominant force on the internet,” Solomon elaborated. Human Security’s findings are based on data processed by its Human Defense Platform, which handled over a quadrillion interactions across its client base.
However, accurately quantifying automated activity across the entire internet presents inherent challenges. “Estimating bot traffic by examining agent strings can yield very noisy results,” explained Filippo Menczer, a professor of Informatics and Computer Science at Indiana University. “These estimates are heavily influenced by the sampling methodology, the data sources, and the points of measurement.”
User-agent strings, which are self-reported identifiers from web crawlers, were used by Human Security to identify AI operators in their report. The firm acknowledges that “the reliability of this self-identification is an increasing concern.” The report also highlights the rapid growth in “agentic” activity—actions performed autonomously by AI agents like OpenClaw on behalf of users. While such activity was minimal in 2024, Human Security observed an astonishing nearly 8,000% increase in 2025.
It’s crucial to note that not all automated traffic is malicious. Features such as Google’s AI Overview and autofill functionalities contribute to this automated traffic. Solomon emphasizes that the dichotomy of “machine bad, human good” is no longer a practical framework. “We must navigate a reality where machines act on our behalf, necessitating the establishment of enduring trust mechanisms,” he advised.
While Human Security’s report may not capture the entirety of internet traffic, it serves as a pivotal benchmark in the evolving AI-driven landscape. The industry has been closely monitoring the steady rise of automated traffic since the debut of ChatGPT in late 2022.
At a recent industry conference, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince noted that prior to the generative AI era, bot traffic constituted approximately 20% of internet activity, largely dominated by search engine crawlers. Prince projects that AI bots will outnumber human traffic by 2027, citing the exponential growth of generative AI and its “insatiable need for data.” This forecast underscores the profound and accelerating shift occurring online.
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