A new cybersecurity report reveals that AI and bots have officially eclipsed human users as the primary source of internet traffic in 2025, signaling a major shift in online dynamics.
Report Findings
- Automated traffic surged by 187% from January to December 2025.
- It grew nearly eight times faster than human activity during the same period.
- AI and bots now dominate overall internet traffic, according to Human Security's analysis.
Key Drivers
- The rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini has fueled the increase in AI-generated traffic.
- Daily use of AI chatbots for information queries contributes significantly to automated interactions.
Expert Commentary
- Stu Solomon, CEO of Human Security: "The internet as a whole was created with this very basic notion that there's a human being on the other side of the computer screen, and that notion is very rapidly being replaced."
- Filippo Menczer, Professor at Indiana University: Estimating bot traffic via user agent strings is unreliable due to noisy data and variable sampling sources.
Data and Limitations
- The report is based on Human Security's Human Defense Platform, which processed over one quadrillion interactions.
- Comprehensive measurement of automated traffic remains challenging without a unified global database, leading to potential inaccuracies in estimates.