The fundamental assumption of the digital age that a person is on the other side of your screen is officially becoming a relic of the past.
According to the State of AI Traffic report released Thursday by cybersecurity firm Human Security, the internet has reached a historic tipping point: automated systems and artificial intelligence (AI) now account for most of the global web traffic, effectively eclipsing human activity.
The shift marks a radical transformation in how the digital ecosystem functions. Stu Solomon, CEO of Human Security, noted that the internet’s original architecture was built on the “basic notion” of human-to-human interaction.
“That notion is very rapidly being replaced,” Solomon told CNBC. “Machine-based traffic is effectively replacing humans as the dominant form of traffic.”
The report highlights a staggering disparity in growth rates. In 2025, automated traffic — defined as activity generated by software systems rather than biological users — expanded eight times faster than human activity.
Much of this “bot-ification” is attributed to the explosion of Large Language Models (LLMs). As users increasingly integrate tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini into their daily workflows, AI-specific traffic surged by 187% between January and December 2025.
Human Security based its findings on a massive data set, claiming to have processed over one quadrillion interactions via its Defense Platform.
However, experts warn that measuring the true ratio of bots to humans is an imperfect science. There is no single, centralized database for the entire internet.
Filippo Menczer, a professor at Indiana University, cautioned that identifying bots often relies on “agent strings,” which can be easily manipulated or misrepresented.
Findings can vary wildly depending on which corner of the web is being monitored.
Despite these technical hurdles, the trend is undeniable.
As AI agents become more sophisticated, performing everything from data scraping to automated customer service, the human internet is becoming a minority stake in a world increasingly run by algorithms.
