Human and bot web traffic share by industry 2023

In 2023, the majority of website traffic was still generated by humans but bot traffic is constantly increasing. Fraudulent traffic through bad bot actors accounted for 57.2 percent of web traffic in the gaming industry, a stark contrast to the mere 16.5 percent of bad bot traffic in the marketing segment. On the other hand, entertainment, food and groceries, and financial services were also categories with notable percentages of good bot traffic.

Distribution of bot and human web traffic worldwide in 2023, by industry

Characteristic	Bad bot	Good bot	Human
Gaming	57.2%	3.3%	39.5%
Telecom and ISPs	49.3%	15.2%	35.6%
Computing & IT	45.9%	13.5%	40.6%
Travel	44.5%	4.4%	51.1%
Community & society	44.2%	6.7%	51.1%
Business services	40.9%	7.7%	51.4%
Healthcare	33.4%	6.8%	59.8%
News	31.9%	7.8%	60.3%
Entertainment	31.1%	55.4%	13.5%
Gambling	30.8%	1.8%	67.5%
Financial services	27%	27.3%	45.7%
Retail	25.8%	20.4%	53.8%
Education	23.9%	9.6%	66.5%
Law & government	22.8%	6.8%	70.4%
Lifestyle	22.7%	8.9%	68.4%
Sports	21.4%	6.5%	72.1%
Automotive	21.3%	13.5%	65.2%
Food & groceries	19%	36.2%	44.9%
Marketing	18.1%	1.5%	80.4%

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Release date

April 2024

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Region

Worldwide

Survey time period

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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