Human and bot web traffic share 2023

In 2023, most of the global website traffic was still generated by humans but bot traffic is constantly growing. Fraudulent traffic through bad bot actors accounted for 32 percent of global web traffic in the most recently measured period, representing an increase of 1.8 percent from the previous year.

Sophistication of Bad Bots on the rise

The complexity of malicious bot activity has dramatically increased in recent years. Advanced bad bots have doubled in prevalence over the past two years, indicating a surge in the sophistication of cyber threats. Simultaneously, simple bad bots saw a 6 percent increase compared to the previous year, suggesting a shift in the landscape of automated threats. Meanwhile, areas like entertainment, and law & government face the highest amount of advanced bad bots, with more than 78 percent of their bot traffic affected by evasive applications.

Good and bad bots across industries

The impact of bot traffic varies across different sectors. Bad bots accounted for over 57.2 percent of the gaming segment's web traffic. Meanwhile, almost half of the online traffic for telecom and ISPs was moved by malicious applications. However, not all bot traffic is considered bad. Some of these applications help index websites for search engines or monitor website performance, assisting users throughout their online search. Therefore, areas like entertainment, food and groceries, and financial services experienced notable levels of good bot traffic, demonstrating the diverse applications of benign automated systems across different sectors.

Distribution of bot and human web traffic worldwide from 2013 to 2023

Characteristic	Bad bot	Good bot	Human
2023	32%	17.6%	50.4%
2022	30.2%	17.3%	52.6%
2021	27.7%	14.6%	57.7%
2020	25.6%	15.2%	59.2%
2019	24.1%	13.1%	62.8%
2018	20.4%	17.5%	62.1%
2017	21.8%	20.4%	57.8%
2016	19.9%	18.8%	61.3%
2015	18.6%	27%	54.4%
2014	22.8%	36.3%	40.9%
2013	23.6%	19.4%	57%

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Release date

April 2024

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Region

Worldwide

Survey time period

2013 to 2023

Supplementary notes

The source states that bad bots interact with applications similarly to a legitimate user, making it harder for them to be detected and prevented, thus enabling high-speed abuse, misuse, and attacks on websites, mobile apps, and APIs. They allow operators, unsavory competitors, attackers, and fraudsters to perform various malicious activities, which include "web scraping, competitive data mining, personal and financial data harvesting, brute-force login, digital ad fraud, spam, transaction fraud, and more. [...]"

On the other hand, good bots allow online businesses and products to be found by prospective customers, with examples including search engine crawlers like GoogleBot and Bingbot. These engines, through their indexing, help people matching their queries with the most relevant sets of websites.

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