The Imperva Bad Bot Report, published annually by cybersecurity firm Imperva (now part of Thales), is one of the most widely cited sources on global bot traffic trends. Its 2025 edition — covering 2024 data — marked a historic milestone: automated bots collectively exceeded human-generated traffic for the first time in roughly ten years, reaching 51% of all web traffic. The report attributes this surge largely to the rise of AI-powered tools and large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, which have dramatically increased automated content scraping and crawling activity.
The report breaks bot traffic into two categories: malicious bots (37% of all web traffic) and benign bots such as legitimate search crawlers and monitoring tools (14%). This distinction matters because the headline "51% bot traffic" figure includes all automated activity, not just harmful bots. Critics note that this broad methodology — which counts API calls, uptime monitors, and search engine crawlers alongside malicious scrapers — may overstate the threat implied by the statistic.
While the Imperva/Thales report is the most comprehensive public dataset on this topic, it comes from a single vendor with commercial incentives in the bot-mitigation space. Independent corroboration at the same scale is limited, and most media coverage citing the 51% figure traces back to the same source. Later estimates, including a 2026 AI Bot Impact Report, place the figure even higher at around 52%, suggesting the trend is continuing upward.