Bots Now Form Over Half of Global Internet Traffic in 2025, Driving API Attacks and Business Metric Distortion
Automated clients generated more than 50% of analyzed internet traffic in 2025, with malicious bots responsible for 40% of the total volume. AI-enabled automation attacks increased 12.5 times year-over-year, while daily API attacks rose 113% according to Akamai data. Simple scripts still dominate volume at 59% of bot traffic, yet sophisticated botnets exceeding 4.5 million devices now distribute activity across residential proxies and compromised endpoints. Credential stuffing, scraping, and transaction abuse continue to target business logic rather than software vulnerabilities, distorting analytics, inflating infrastructure costs, and degrading user experience. Cloudflare reports that 20% of verified bot traffic now comes from AI crawlers, blurring lines between beneficial and harmful automation. Organizations must classify bots by intent, delegation, and business impact instead of relying on IP reputation or single signals such as User-Agent strings.
Habr•Malware & Botnets
