Human and bot web traffic share by industry 2022

In 2022, the majority of website traffic was still generated by humans but bot traffic is constantly increasing. Fraudulent traffic through bad bot actors accounted for 58.7 percent of web traffic in the Gaming industry, a stark contrast to the mere 16.5 percent of bad bot traffic in the automotive segment. On the other hand, entertainment, financial services, and food and groceries, were also categories with notable percentages of good bot traffic.

Distribution of bot and human web traffic worldwide in 2022, by industry

Characteristic	Bad bot	Good bot	Human
Gaming	58.7%	4.6%	36.6%
Telecom and ISPs	47.7%	8.8%	43.6%
Community & society	41.4%	8.5%	50.1%
Computing & IT	40%	12.8%	47.3%
Business services	38%	7.7%	54.3%
Travel	37.4%	4.3%	58.3%
Food & groceries	32.2%	25.1%	42.8%
Sports	31.8%	4.1%	64.1%
Healthcare	31.7%	9.8%	58.5%
Entertainment	29.8%	53.6%	16.6%
Financial services	26.9%	26.9%	46.2%
Marketing	26%	4.5%	69.4%
Gambling	25%	2.3%	72.7%
Retail	22.7%	20.9%	56.3%
Law & government	22%	4.1%	73.9%
Education	20.4%	8.1%	71.4%
News	19.5%	7.1%	73.5%
Lifestyle	18.3%	7.9%	73.8%
Automotive	16.5%	11%	72.5%

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Release date

May 2023

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Region

Worldwide

Survey time period

2022

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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