Bots Now Account for 30% of Global Web Traffic, Surpassing Human Activity in Some Regions

The Internet, once dominated by human interaction, is undergoing a seismic shift as bots now constitute approximately 30% of global web traffic, according to recent Cloudflare Radar data.

In certain regions, automated traffic even outpaces human activity, signaling a transformative era driven by web crawlers and AI-specific bots.

AI Crawlers Reshape Web Dynamics

These automated scripts, ranging from benign search indexers to malicious actors, have become integral to the digital ecosystem, with their roles expanding beyond traditional search engine indexing into the realm of artificial intelligence (AI) data collection.

This surge reflects both the opportunities and challenges of a web increasingly shaped by automation, as stakeholders grapple with issues of content rights, infrastructure strain, and data privacy.

Web crawlers, dating back to the 1993 debut of the World Wide Web Wanderer and later pioneers like JumpStation and WebCrawler, have long underpinned the Internet’s search functionality by indexing content for visibility in search engine results.

However, the landscape has evolved dramatically with the rise of AI crawlers, designed to scrape vast datasets for training large language models (LLMs).

Googlebot and GPTBot Lead as AI

Cloudflare’s analysis reveals an 18% increase in combined AI and search crawler traffic from May 2024 to May 2025, with peaks of 32% growth in April 2025.

Googlebot, the dominant crawler for Google Search, saw a staggering 96% rise in activity over the same period, expanding its share from 30% to 50% of total crawler traffic, likely fueled by innovations like AI Overviews.

Meanwhile, OpenAI’s GPTBot emerged as a key player, leaping from a 2.2% share to 7.7%, with a 305% surge in raw requests, underscoring the insatiable demand for data to power tools like ChatGPT.

Other AI crawlers, such as PerplexityBot, recorded astronomical growth at 157,490% in requests, though from a smaller base, while Bytespider plummeted from 22.8% to 2.9% share, reflecting a volatile and competitive field.

The dual nature of bots categorized as “good” (e.g., Googlebot, API clients) or “bad” (e.g., spam or credential-stuffing bots) adds complexity to this trend.

AI crawlers, a newer subset, raise unique concerns over unauthorized content use, with some website owners leveraging tools like robots.txt and firewalls to restrict access.

Cloudflare data from June 2025 shows that 14% of top domains explicitly target AI bots in their robots.txt files, with GPTBot being the most blocked yet also the most allowed, highlighting a nuanced balance between visibility and protection.

As crawlers increasingly drive traffic peaking in March and April 2025, mirroring seasonal human Internet patterns their integration into search (e.g., Google’s AI Mode) and social platforms (e.g., Meta AI) suggests a future where AI and traditional web functions are inseparable.

This shift, while promising enhanced digital experiences, demands robust frameworks to address ethical and technical challenges, as the line between human and bot activity continues to blur.

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