HUMAN Security: Automated Traffic Grew 8 Times Faster Than Human Traffic in 2025

September 14, 2026 · mediapost.com

HUMAN Security's 2026 State of AI Traffic & Cyberthreat Benchmark Report, released today, found automated traffic grew 23.51% year over year in 2025, compared with 3.10% growth in human traffic. CEO Stu Soloman said about half of all online traffic is now machine-based, with roughly 2% classified as agentic activity acting with authority on a person's behalf. Monthly AI-driven traffic rose 187% over the year, and training crawlers for large language models made up 67.5% of that traffic even as their share declined: AI scraper traffic grew 597% and agentic AI traffic grew 7,851%. OpenAI's bots, including ChatGPT User, OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot and ChatGPT Agent, accounted for about 69% of AI-driven traffic volume, Meta-ExternalAgent for 16%, and Anthropic's ClaudeBot and Claude-SearchBot for roughly 11%. Account takeover volume fell more than 30% in 2025, and HUMAN's customers averaged 402,000 post-login compromise attempts each, quadrupling from nearly 100,000 in 2024.

Campaigns that rely on click and visit counts risk inflated reach numbers as machine traffic approaches half of all activity, and the shift from search to transactions means agentic bots may soon complete purchases or logins that get counted as real conversions. Retail and ecommerce, streaming and media, and travel and hospitality already draw more than 95% of this automation, so brands in those categories should expect measurement noise to grow before it stabilizes. Media buyers evaluating attribution vendors should ask how bot and agentic traffic gets filtered from campaign reporting, since a rising share of recorded conversions may never involve a human decision-maker.