Automated requests overtook human traffic in 2024 — by 2025, 53% of web requests were bots
Asked:
“What is the share of human traffic, search engine bots, AI agents, and other sources of traffic on the internet over the last 5 years?”
Five annual rows, 2021–2025 — all five requested years — each a percentage of HTTP/web requests observed by large web-security networks (the Imperva Bad Bot Report series; 2025 crawler detail from Cloudflare). Human share fell from 57.7% to 47.0% while automated traffic rose from 42.3% to 53.0%. A clean five-year split into search-engine bots and AI agents does not exist: those categories were measured separately only in 2025.
HumanMalicious botsLegitimate bots — hover a year for details
Limits of the 2025 split: Cloudflare measured all identified AI crawlers at 4.2% of HTML requests and Googlebot alone at 4.5% — a lower bound for search-engine bots, not the full category. Subtracting both from Imperva's 53.0% automated total leaves 44.3% as other or unclassified automation, but this is a hybrid estimate across two providers and denominators, not an independently measured figure.
What the 2025 automated share is made of
Automated requests passed human requests in 2024 (51.0% vs 49.0%) and widened the lead to 53.0% in 2025.
imperva.comReported malicious-bot share rose every year, from 27.7% in 2021 to 40.0% in 2025.
shadowaiwatch.comLegitimate bots peaked at 17.6% in 2023 then fell to 13.0% by 2025, as classification tightened.
techhq.comIn 2025, Googlebot alone (4.5% of HTML requests) still slightly outweighed all identified AI crawlers combined (4.2%).
searchengineland.com
Annual figures
| Year | Human % | All automated % | Legitimate bots % | Malicious bots % | Search-engine bots % (lower bound) | AI agents % | Source |
|---|
Method: shares of HTTP/web requests observed by large web-security and CDN networks — not bandwidth, unique people, or page views. Five rows, one per year 2021–2025, from the Imperva Bad Bot Report series as reported by several sources; 2025 search-engine and AI-crawler detail is Cloudflare year-in-review data (share of HTML requests). The 2021 human/automated split uses the internally consistent 57.7%/42.3% implied by 14.6% good bots plus 27.7% bad bots. Search-engine and AI-agent shares for 2021–2024 were not separately reported and are shown as unavailable, not zero. The 44.3% other/unclassified 2025 figure is a hybrid derivation, not measured.