Bots Now Form Over Half of Global Internet Traffic in 2025, Driving API Attacks and Business Metric Distortion
Bots already account for the majority of internet traffic, creating challenges that extend far beyond traditional information security. In 2025, automated clients generated more than 50% of observed traffic, with malicious bots responsible for 40% of the total. The number of attacks leveraging AI-enabled automation grew 12.5 times compared with the previous year.
During the 81st anniversary of Victory Day, Garda WAF blocked over 3.5 million attacks and stopped more than 307,000 bot requests targeting the Immortal Regiment historical movement site. Industry reports vary because vendors analyze different networks and apply different counting methods, yet the consistent message is that human-generated requests can no longer be assumed by default.
Shift of automated traffic from web pages to APIs
Modern bots increasingly target APIs directly instead of emulating browsers. Akamai data shows a 113% rise in daily API attacks, with 87% of organizations reporting at least one API-related security incident. The share of attacks involving unauthorized business workflows grew from 30% to 61%.
At the same time, simple automated scripts remain dominant. Qrator Labs statistics for Q2 2025 indicate that basic bots generated 59% of protected bot traffic while API bots accounted for 38%. A single large botnet observed by the company contained more than 4.5 million devices, twenty times larger than the biggest network detected the previous year.
New categories of crawlers and agents
Cloudflare Radar data reveals that 40% of verified bot traffic came from search crawlers, 20% from AI crawlers, and 13% from SEO bots. The boundary between beneficial and harmful automation has blurred because AI agents can generate high load, consume content without returning visitors, or perform reconnaissance under the guise of legitimate use.
OWASP classifies automated abuse of legitimate application functions as automated threats. Common scenarios include credential stuffing, scraping of pricing and inventory data, gift-card enumeration, ticket hoarding, and market manipulation through fake reviews or demand signals.
Impact on business metrics and infrastructure
Bot traffic distorts web analytics by inflating session counts and lowering observed conversion rates. An example shows that 5,000 additional bot sessions can reduce measured conversion from 3% to 2% without any change in real customer behavior. Infrastructure resources are consumed for CDN traffic, database queries, and third-party service limits, while aggressive protection mechanisms such as repeated CAPTCHAs can degrade genuine user experience.
Detection now relies on combinations of signals rather than single indicators. JA3/JA4 TLS fingerprints, header ordering, JavaScript execution integrity, and behavioral patterns within sessions help distinguish automated clients even when they use real browser engines such as Chromium, Playwright, or Puppeteer.
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