AI bot web traffic is closing in on human usage, experts warn (www.techradar.com)

Recent data indicates that AI bots, particularly those utilized for web scraping, are rapidly increasing their presence online, potentially overtaking human users for web traffic. According to Tollbit, the ratio of AI bot visits to human visits shifted dramatically from 1 in 200 at the beginning of 2025 to 1 in 31 by late 2025. This rise coincided with a decline in human web traffic, attributed in part to users increasingly seeking information through AI-driven platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini instead of traditional search engines. As a result, websites that have not established direct licensing agreements with AI tools are experiencing a significant drop in click-through rates. This trend raises critical concerns for publishers as the effectiveness of robots.txt files, which guide automated bots on crawling permissions, is becoming increasingly questionable—30% of the time, bots ignored these guidelines, and in some instances like OpenAI's ChatGPT-User, this rate soared to 42%. With the current landscape, where AI bots could soon dominate web interactions, experts are calling for regulatory measures to safeguard intellectual property and ensure a balanced coexistence between human users and AI bots. The evolving nature of internet traffic signifies a major transition, indicating that website owners may need to rethink their strategies to engage primarily with AI-driven visitors.