The Rapid Growth of Automated Traffic: Key Insights
Understanding the Growth of Automated Traffic in 2025
According to HUMAN Security’s State of AI Traffic report, automated traffic experienced a significant increase of 23.5% year over year in 2025, outpacing human traffic growth by almost eight times, which rose by 3.1%.
- AI-driven traffic played a crucial role in driving this growth, with the average monthly volume surging by 187% year over year. Moreover, traffic from AI agents and agentic browsers, like OpenAI’s Atlas and Perplexity’s Comet, skyrocketed by nearly 8,000% annually.
- The report defines automated traffic as all internet traffic generated by software systems rather than human users. This includes traditional automation tools such as search engine crawlers, monitoring bots, scraping tools, and AI-driven traffic.
- Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince previously predicted that bots could surpass human web usage by 2027, emphasizing the increasing significance of automated systems in online activities.
Impact on Search and User Interaction
Why is this important? Search processes are now influenced by more than just human input. AI agents are actively involved in the discovery, comparison, and transaction phases, both within established search engines like Google and through AI-driven interfaces.
Key Insights:
- Training crawlers, which collect data for models, represent the largest share of AI traffic at 67.5%. However, their dominance is gradually declining as scrapers and agents expand their presence.
- Real-time scrapers, powering AI search and answer engines, experienced a substantial growth of nearly 600% in 2025.
- Agentic AI systems, which autonomously execute tasks, though currently smaller in share, exhibit the fastest growth and are significantly disruptive in their operations.
Behavior of AI Agents: Unlike traditional crawlers, AI agents mimic user behavior more closely. These systems are increasingly involved in navigating website funnels, logging in, and completing transactions. In 2025:
- 77% of observed agent activity concentrated on product and search pages.
- Almost 9% engaged in account-level interactions.
- Over 2% traversed checkout processes.
Data Analysis: HUMAN analyzed a staggering one quadrillion interactions across its customer base in 2025, spanning aggregated and anonymized data from 2022 to 2025. The classification of AI-driven traffic into training crawlers, AI scrapers, and agentic AI was done through user-agent strings, infrastructure signals, and observed behavior, with a recognition of potential limitations in accurately identifying bot activities.
Key Takeaway: The landscape of online traffic is evolving towards increased automation, blurring the lines between human and machine interactions. To enhance digital presence, businesses must accommodate machines that can access, understand, and respond to their content effectively.
For more detailed insights, refer to the complete report here.
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