- In 2024, 51% of all Internet traffic fell into the bots, the Thales report states
- Not all bots are malicious, but many are
- Travel and retail industries are particularly successful
The bots, automated programs that execute tasks over the Internet, are now occupying more than half of all Internet traffic, as new research has claimed.
The 2025 Bad Bot report found that this was the first time in a decade that 51% of all web traffic constituted Bot traffic, attributing change to a large extent to the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and the great language models (LLM).
The impeva report focuses, first, on bad bots. He argues that travel and retail sectors face an “advanced bot problem”, where bad bots represent 41% and 59% of all traffic, respectively. In 2024, the travel industry was the most attacked sector with 27% of all Bot attacks (compared to 21% of the previous year).
Bad bots
With the proliferation of the generative AI, things will only get worse, he emphasizes. Bytespider Bot is only apparently responsible for more than half (54%) of all the attacks enabled for AI. Other significant taxpayers include Applebot (26%), Claudebot (13%) and Chatgpt user (6%).
However, not all Bot traffic is malicious. There are many already essential useful bots, such as search motor trackers, monitoring bots, social media bots or data scraping bots. They are used to index websites for search engines, verify the performance websites or inactivity time, schedule publications or respond automatically, or to add sites and scrape valuable data.
Even so, bad bots occupy a considerable part of all Bots traffic, presenting a real challenge for the cyber security community.
These tools, whose popularity exploded approximately three years ago with the introduction of Chat-GPT, have simplified the creation and scale of malicious bots, imperva said.
“As IA tools become more accessible, cybercounts are increasingly taking advantage of these technologies to create and deploy malicious bots that now represent 37% of all Internet traffic, a significant increase of 32% in 2023,” the company explained.
“This is the sixth consecutive year of growth in the activity of Bad Bot, raising security challenges for organizations that strive to safeguard their digital assets.”
