The internet plays a significant role in people’s lives, connecting individuals, organizations, and businesses across the globe.
Hiding within the vast expanse of cyberspace are automated software applications known as “bots.”
These bots contribute to the overall internet traffic, serving different purposes, from beneficial to malicious.
Do you want to know what percentage of internet traffic is bots in 2024?
Let’s find out.
Key Statistics
- Around 47% of total internet traffic is from bots, up by 5.1% from the previous year.
- Nearly 41% of the internet traffic came from bots in 2020.
- As of 2022, roughly 17% of the internet traffic came from good bots.
- Bad bots accounted for approximately 30% of the overall internet traffic in 2022.
- Integrated web analytics tools like Google Analytics or Heap can help detect bot traffic.
- Businesses use CAPTCHA puzzles and other bot challenges to verify human authenticity.
What Percentage of Internet Traffic is Bots in 2024?
Bots are software applications or scripts performing automated tasks on the internet.
They are designed to perform different activities and interact with various platforms and online systems.
About 47.4% of the total internet traffic is from bots, increasing by 5.1% from the previous year.
The remaining 52.6% are from human traffic.
A large portion of bot traffic came from bad bots, accounting for over 30% of the internet traffic, while 17.3% came from good bots.
Bot Traffic
The following are the percentages of bot traffic from 2015 to 2022:
- 45.6% of the internet traffic came from bots in 2015
- 38.7% of the internet traffic came from bots in 2016
- 42.2% of the internet traffic came from bots in 2017
- 37.9% of the internet traffic came from bots in 2018
- 37.2% of the internet traffic came from bots in 2019
- 40.8% of the internet traffic came from bots in 2020
- 42.3% of the internet traffic came from bots in 2021
- 47.4% of the internet traffic came from bots in 2022
What are Bots?
“Bots” is a short term for “robots” programmed to interact with websites, apps, and other users.
They are categorized into good bots and bad bots.
Good bots serve useful purposes like website indexing and automating routine tasks.
On the other hand, bad bots engage in malicious activities, including data theft and spamming.
Good Bots
Good bots are created by reputable organizations and serve beneficial purposes.
They are used by search engines like Google and Bing to index web pages and gather information about websites.
Other bots are designed to track website performance, availability, and security.
Some good bots automate tasks on social media, such as posting updates, providing customer support, and analyzing data, while some simulate human interaction with website visitors and messaging platform users.
What Percentage of Internet Traffic is Good Bots?
As of 2022, about 17.3% of the overall internet traffic is from good bots, up from 14.6% from the prior year.
Here are the percentages of good bots traffic from 2018 to 2022:
- In 2018, good bots traffic reached 17.5%
- In 2019, good bots traffic reached 13.1%
- In 2020, good bots traffic reached 15.2%
- In 2021, good bots traffic reached 14.6%
- In 2022, good bots traffic reached 17.3%
Bad Bots
Bad bots are created with malicious intentions and engage in activities that can cause harm or disrupt online systems.
They are used for web scraping that extracts data from websites without permission.
Some bad bots are malware bots. They infect computers and networks with malicious software, enabling data theft and mining.
Other bad bots are spam bots that distribute fraudulent messages or advertisements, while others are DDoS bots involved in DDoS attacks.
Approximately 24.3% of bad bots are impersonators, 1.7% are web scrapers, 2.6% are hacker tools, and 0.3% are spam bots.
What Percentage of Internet Traffic is Bad Bots?
Roughly 30.2% of the total internet traffic came from bad bots, growing from 27.7% last year.
Below are the percentages of bad bots traffic from 2018 to 2022:
- Bad bots accounted for 20.4% of the internet traffic in 2018
- Bad bots accounted for 24.1% of the internet traffic in 2019
- Bad bots accounted for 25.6% of the internet traffic in 2020
- Bad bots accounted for 27.7% of the internet traffic in 2021
- Bad bots accounted for 30.2% of the internet traffic in 2022
How to Identify Bot Traffic?
Bot traffic can be identified using various methods and indicators.
Web engineers can analyze the network requests made on the websites and identify patterns that indicate bot traffic.
Repetitive or unusual request patterns indicate the presence of bots.
Aside from that, integrated web analytics tools like Google Analytics or Heap can assist in detecting bot traffic.
Here are some of the analytics anomalies associated with bot activity:
- A sudden spike in traffic from an unexpected region or location
- An unprecedented increase in pageviews
- Abnormal growth in the bounce rate
- An unexplained increase and drop in session duration
- Junk conversions
How Businesses Mitigate the Impacts of Bad Bots?
Businesses employ various strategies to mitigate the impacts of malicious bots and minimize the risks.
They implement bot detection systems and tools that identify and block malicious bot traffic.
Businesses also require users to solve CAPTCHA puzzles and other bot challenges to verify human authenticity.
Other website owners use IP blocking, blacklisting, Web Application Firewalls, two-factor authentication, user-agent filtering, rate limiting, and throttling.
Conclusion
Bots can be helpful to businesses and individuals. They automate repetitive tasks that can save a lot of time.
They also enhance the overall customer experience by improving response time.
Aside from that, bots can collect and analyze large volumes of data, helping businesses gain insights into market trends, customer behavior, and user preferences.
While some bots are beneficial, others are designed to engage in malicious activities.
It is important to take appropriate measures to detect, prevent, and mitigate the risks of harmful bots.
Based on Imperva’s most recent report, more than 47% of the internet traffic came from bots.
Bad bots accounted for approximately 30% of the internet traffic, while 17.3% are from good bots.
That answers the question, “What percentage of internet traffic is bots?”