The 2025 Imperva Bad Bot Report (published by Thales) marked a historic milestone: automated bot traffic crossed the 50% threshold for the first time, leaving humans at just 49% of global web activity. The shift was driven largely by the rapid proliferation of AI-powered bots tied to large language models like ChatGPT, which fuel massive demand for web crawling and content scraping.
Within that 51% bot share, malicious bots accounted for 37% of all traffic, while benign bots (such as legitimate search crawlers and monitoring tools) made up the remaining 14%, according to Statista's visualization of the same dataset. Fastly's own threat research corroborates the broader trend of AI bots straining networks in real time, and a 2026 AI Bot Impact Report places the figure even higher at 52%.
However, the milestone deserves context. The 50% threshold is crossed by just one percentage point in a single vendor's report, and Imperva's methodology counts all automated activity — including benign API calls and monitoring scripts — as "bots." No independent dataset of comparable scope has confirmed the figure, so while the directional trend is well-supported, the precise claim of "more than half" rests on one primary source.