Bad bot traffic is growing 9 times faster than human web traffic

Malicious bots are growing at an alarming rate, expanding nine times faster than human traffic online, according to a recent report by DataDome. From July 2025 to June 2026, bad automated traffic increased by 124%, surpassing human traffic growth by a factor of nine. AI traffic surged by more than 82% during the same period. The data, collected from over 1 trillion requests across 75,000 customer sites, provides a comprehensive view of bot traffic online.

Scraping activity saw a massive 185% increase, while bots used for scalping (obtaining high-demand items like tickets) rose nearly three times faster than the previous year. AI bots, specifically, targeted login pages at eight times the rate they did in 2025.

Jérôme Segura, VP of threat research at DataDome, warns that automated traffic is no longer just a volume issue at the edge of the internet but also infiltrating sensitive areas such as login pages, account creation flows, carts, and payment endpoints. These areas are directly connected to customer accounts, personal information, inventory, promotions, and transactions.

Segura emphasizes that abuse at these endpoints can lead to credential testing, account takeover, card testing, inventory abuse, promotion abuse, and fraudulent transactions.

The report detected 52.7 billion crawler requests from AI agents and large language models (LLMs), with Meta-affiliated systems accounting for over 46% of these requests. OpenAI was the second-largest bot dispatcher, responsible for nearly 35% of the total. DataDome tested 20,000 websites and found that 65.3% lacked protection against the 10 bot types studied, while only 2.4% of sites had full protection, a significant drop from 8.4% in 2024 and slightly below the 2.8% in 2023.

While the 185% increase in scraping might seem concerning due to the rise of AI, Ted Miracco, CEO of cloud software platform Approov, notes that this cannot solely be attributed to AI. Scalping, another bot activity, poses significant threats to businesses, potentially leading to lower margins, lost customer goodwill, and inventory issues.

Despite the rise in bot traffic, Segura insists that these findings do not support the "dead internet theory," which suggests that the internet would primarily consist of bot activity and automated content rather than human-created connections. In fact, humans still generated 73.4% of requests during the study period.