The 2025 Imperva/Thales Bad Bot Report found that automated bots made up 51% of all global web traffic in 2024, marking the first time bots have outnumbered human users online. This figure includes both malicious bots, such as those used for scraping or attacks, and benign bots like search engine crawlers and API calls.
Other sources, such as Statista and Fastly, have echoed similar numbers, though most rely on Imperva’s original dataset and methodology. The reported percentage has also been cited in the 2026 AI Bot Impact Report, which estimated bots at 52% of traffic.
It’s important to note that different organizations may define and measure ‘bot traffic’ differently, and not all bots are harmful. The Imperva/Thales figure is currently the industry benchmark, but it comes primarily from a single vendor’s analysis.