"Bots Now Outnumber Humans Online And The Internet Was Never Built For This."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/josipamajic/2026/06/04/bots-now-outnumber-humans-online-and-the-internet-was-never-built-for-this/
(#paywalled)
"The culprit is not the old wave of scraper bots and search crawlers, but agentic AI… #AgenticAI…made up just 1.7% of automated traffic at the start of last year. By the end of 2025 that category had grown 8,000%."
Amazing that Forbes has falled for this shit.
That data doesn't say that bots outnumber humans online; far from it, in fact.
What it says is that bots generate more traffic, and that's a very different thing.
A single scrapper bot can visit dozens of sites in a second. So a handful of bots controlled by a handful of humans can generate much more traffíc than a hundred of humans acting like a human acts.
So no, bots don't outnumber humans online. Far from it.
But they generate more traffic, which is bad enough. Even worse, the fact that most humans are still barely using those bots means bot traffic will continue raising in the foreseeable future.
@jgg @petersuber From the Forbes article: 'machines now generate more web traffic than people.' They did make this distinction at the top of the article.
It looks like a textbook case of a writer that writes an accurate report, and then an editor writes for it a headline so over the top that it is a blatant lie, but as it is a magnificent clickbait too, he goes ahead anyway.
@jgg @jackyan the second headline says also clearly that it's the traffic. @petersuber
@jgg @petersuber that's right! the cloudflare CEO lied and these reporters fall for it. it's an obvious lie too.
https://www.flyingpenguin.com/cloudflare-ceo-is-lying-to-you-about-the-bot-traffic-jump/