Given how many rounds of captchas I have to fight through, I'm not sure if these numbers are accurate.

Dead internet theory

Given how most of the internet is on mobile, I wonder how much that would skew this.

“First time”

The graph seems like it only goes back to April 27 and on that day it was 57% bot…

For the first time? No way. People were saying this 5, 10, 15+ years ago.

Automated systems that don’t sleep and are often programmed to aggressively scrape and are limited only by compute capacity outstripped humanity? I am not surprised by this at all.

If they were truly this accurate at identifying sources of bot traffic, you'd think they'd be better at blocking them without inconveniencing the rest of us.

Dead internet theory gaining more credibility with every passing day.

Only for HTML content. Total traffic would have been surprising.

According to the Thales Bad Bot Report, in 2025 >53% of traffic came from bots. 2024 was 50 - 50, and in 2013, it was measured at 43%.

AI-driven* bot activity has increased more than tenfold however in the past 12 months so I'm confident this will grow to a very solid majority.

OP: please add [2012] to the title

It's a silly metric. There could be only one master bot that pings every known endpoint multiple times a second, and that would probably surpass all human activity, too. It doesn't really tell us much about intention or the ability to masquerade as humans.

Where I would start to worry is if there's evidence that bot access patterns are starting to become harder to distinguish from human access patterns, which would suggest that they are, in fact, mimicking or masquerading as humans. I don't care how many search bots are indexing web content, but I do worry about how many social bots are attempting to manipulate or mislead people.

Any thoughts on why ~30% of HTTP request are in US? I know we had first mover advantage for awhile but I'd expect this to have been diluted by larger populations by now. It doesn't appear to be AI/bot driven either.

I was tracking this as part of an older job and this has been the case for some years now - started around the Covid time with all the scalping bots etc and has just been building up.

This sorta mirrors the early-mid 2010's when people[1] were worried about how much of the internet was streaming traffic.

[1] Mostly ISP's annoyed at not being able to monetize it and folks trying to sell monetization solutions to them - https://www.sandvine.com/hubfs/Sandvine_Redesign_2019/Downlo...

I'm looking forward to the fraud lawsuites from ad companies

Would love to see it go further back and some meaningful metric of how much is web scrapers vs bots.

CF posts metrics which reinforces their business... shocking

Not shocking if CF is now trying really hard to keep me out of the internet