A machine space for machines. This is what the Internet is progressively becoming. A virtual space in which bots already generate almost as much traffic as humans and in which we must rethink what terms such as “visits”, “users”, “clicks”, etc. mean.
This is what he assures «Bad Bot Report»a new study developed by the cybersecurity company Imperva and which reflects that 49.6% of all traffic generated on the network in 2023 was originated artificially.
This only fuels what is known as Dead Internet Theory, a theory with conspiracy overtones that ensures that the bulk of the Internet is based on the activity of bots and content automatically generated by AI and intelligent algorithms, limiting human activity to a minimum. The defenders of this theory, however, go one step (or several) further, and also ensure that these bots have been created intentionally to alter search results and manipulate consumer behavior.
As the report reflects, the number of bots on the Internet has grown by 2% compared to 2022 and already represents the highest percentage since this ranking began to be prepared in 2013. In some countries the situation is especially striking, such as an Ireland on whose networks it is estimated that 71% of the traffic generated originates from an artificial entity.
Part of this automated traffic comes from bots that destroy social networks such as X (the old Twitter), Facebook or Intagram; but increasingly it has its origin in generative AI and LLMs, whose bots continuously crawl the network to collect data with which to continue training models such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, etc.
If this trend continues (and it does not seem likely that there will be anything capable of reversing it), we will soon find ourselves in a scenario in which traffic generated by bots exceeds that generated by humans, so as explained Nanhi Singh, general manager of application security at Imperva, “will change the way organizations approach the development and protection of their websites and applications; Furthermore, as more tools with AI capabilities are introduced, bots will become ubiquitous.”