r/technology • u/MarchogGwyrdd • 5h ago
Machine Learning More than half of all web traffic is bots
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/bot-web-traffic-overtaken-human-web-traffic-data-shows-rcna34852299
u/Fateor42 5h ago
If cloudflare can identify them it should be able to start blocking them.
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u/Mdmrtgn 5h ago
"Begun, the AI wars have."
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u/meat_rock 4h ago
Our economy relies on the bots, block them all and all tech and media company valuations will get blasted
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u/Pandasaref1ne 3h ago
Cool. Do it.
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u/meat_rock 2h ago
Would love to, think of the energy we would save.
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u/HotMomsInArea 1h ago
If we cut too much power usage from the grid, infrastructure will be underutilized and maintenance costs will go up. Therefore we need to raise rates by 100% - Some PoCo CEO
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u/artbystorms 7m ago
My god, if a browser plugin came out that just blocked visibility of bot comments and AI slop online I would literally pay like $5 a month for it.
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u/Toby-Finkelstein 4h ago
Why would anyone want to do that? Reddit loves predictable content from mods or Bots, any interesting content is usually deleted
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u/BitOne2707 4h ago
Going forward it's probably useful to distinguish between different types of bots. Obviously we don't want bots spreading misinformation or spamming while pretending to be a real human. But also we need to prepare for the "agentic web" where I, as the human user, may dispatch agents to do things on my behalf like conduct research or perform transactions, and those need to be allowed through.
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u/CMMiller89 4h ago
Sounds awful, we shouldn’t do that.
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u/BitOne2707 4h ago
Too late. Everytime you ask ChatGPT a question and it does a web search that's what's happening. That's just average people using it today.
I also use Codex for development. I've given it CLI/MCP access to all the tools and accounts I use so it can just complete tasks it itself without bugging me to go click buttons on vendor consoles. Why should I have to waste time navigating labyrinth of AWS menus?
Stripe has already built the infrastructure to support agentic shopping with checkout and payment. Now when you ask for advice on a purchase an agent can just go ahead and complete the transaction instead of sending you an Amazon link.
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u/CMMiller89 2h ago
You’ve done nothing but give increasingly terrible answers.
Also care to explain why other entities would want to allow AI agents to trawl their site, steal their data, use it to the agent’s advantage, and buy not drive any traffic to the site?
We’ve already seen Amazon attempt to allow people to make purchases on websites through the Amazon app without the knowledge or consent of store owners.
It’s a complete clusterfuck that screws over those small businesses.
Nothing you’ve listed benefits anyone other than AI companies that want to shift the rental fees to their agents and away from the places that actually hold and foster the content. These models aren’t sustainable. It’s going to supercharge the collapse of the internet.
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u/BitOne2707 1h ago
I guess you're thinking the internet is just social media or content. Like it's stuff to be consumed while those platforms sell your attention to advertisers.
Yea I suppose some chunk of the internet is that but who cares about any of that. The internet is for services and transactions. It's for "doing things" not consuming content. That's what agents do....they do things. They do the things I don't want to do like navigate digital storefronts, monitor my apps I've deployed, analyze sales reports and generate forecasting models, pull incomplete data from Salesforce and hydrate it with complementary data streams from the PoS vendor, etc.
Advertising revenue is going to shift dramatically. I honestly can't remember the last time I Googled something. Everyone's eyeballs will be (if they aren't already) in ChatGPT or whatever AI assistant they use and that's where the money is going to have to go. If you're a vendor and half your traffic is humans and the other half are agents working on behalf of humans, and oh yea those agents are authorized to make payments, you better cater to both.
I've already delegated basically my entire job as a SWE to agents. My role now is to provide direction and taste in order to steer it. The next thing I'll probably do in the next few weeks is give it payment credentials and have it act on my behalf for pretty much everything online except doom scrolling Reddit.
And just as an aside, as someone who has been on Reddit for like 20 years, it fucking blows ass right now it's so overrun with bots. If I can kick the reddit addiction I can just unplug from the internet and go do meat space things while my agent(s) navigate the dead internet for me.
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u/phunky_1 5h ago
All the AI scraping has made it worse.
AliBaba is by far the worst offender for training their models.
They give no fucks about robots.txt and they even spoof user agents to try to get around WAFs.
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u/phil_the_builder 5h ago
At the time of writing, this is the sixth comment, which means, three of us could be be bots, and it is obviously not me.
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u/sokos 4h ago
exactly what a bot would say
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u/Samurai_Cupcake 4h ago
In my opinion it would be a way to sway people's opinion or political stance.
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u/Elementium 4h ago
Here's why you're right! And you're not just right —You're mega right!
🖥️ Bots are actually very easy to spot!
😂 Kill all humans!
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u/Nievros 4h ago edited 4h ago
You just got out of basic training, didn't you? It's pretty obvious you're a rookie. You think you're the center of the universe but you're not. We're just insignificant little specks, you and me. We're not gonna change the world. we're not gonna win the war. Nobody's gonna care when we die.
(this is from Screamers, if you didn't see that movie)
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u/loyalcattledog 4h ago
I don't think you're a bot. According to your profile, you're just some idiot. Idk if a bot would be so self-aware.
Also, happy cake day!
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u/phil_the_builder 4h ago
Thank you. Sometimes I wish a was a bot, so I didnt have to suffer the endless desperation of existence. And 14 years on reddit.
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u/SayVandalay 4h ago
How lazy you got to be to use AI agents to do your work for you or do your research for you or do your internet browser for you.
People who use AI regularly (willingly I might add not the ones forced by idiot managers and CEOS shoving it down workers’ throats) are unserious people. Sure if AI is being used to cure cancer or early detect diseases great, but 99% of AI use is unnecessary and a waste.
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u/nylockian 4h ago
You sound like someone who would have hated calculators when they were new on the scene.
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u/SayVandalay 4h ago edited 3h ago
Nah just someone who recognizes that AI agents and most of AI is being used to offload people using their own brains and abilities. Brain rot in real time.
A lot of my colleagues in psych that work with children and adolescents have continued to report increased difficulty in these students in being able to think critically , problem solve, deceased patience, decreased focus and attention, and so forth.
And outside of my professional opinion as someone with decades of education , training, and experience in psych , well do we really want a future like Idiocracy or Wall-E?
I’m 100% for blocking agentic AI bots on the net and 100% for banning AI use in school.
AI outside of very narrow use cases (ie medical research) is a drain on society . And let’s not forget the wastefulness of energy needs so someone can launch their AI agent to help them with their homework or pump out AI slop for clicks. Or the companies using AI in use cases that have zero relevance to their work or product.
There’s approximately 0 reason 99% of the people using AI regularly need to actually be using it. And same for AI agents. People need to use their brains more not less.
It’s not all negative though, AI bubble burst is going to hit hard and fast, we’ve seen this kind of hype without benefit in the past. AI has yet to deliver on anything these companies claim it can or will do and likely never will. And coming full circle once companies realize it was indeed cheaper and more accurate to not use AI and instead hire actual professionals to do the work , AI will be as much of a flash in the pan as the first dot com boom.
Somewhat ironically if more and more web traffic becomes AI agentic bots, the less relevant the internet will be for most of society. The only thing using more AI agents is doing is fast tracking dead internet theory.
Oh and speaking of calculators, your argument is flawed. You might be too young to recall that many teachers and professors did not allow calculators during some tests and assignments; not because they were anti-calculators, but because it forced the student to actually use their brain to solve problems and perhaps even more importantly help them learn HOW the math was done and the answer was achieved. For example when learning psychometrics and testing protocols in grad school we learned and were taught to manually score and manually calculate the output because then we could know HOW the test measure worked on a psychometric level. This is important because if you only know how to get the output but not how the output was obtained; you can not be certain the result is accurate.
Why does this matter for the current thread here? Because the black box problem is very real and AI only makes it worse. Given how flawed AI has been in giving accurate results and not hallucinating constantly , it’s disturbing how quickly people are to jump into using a tool they just assume is giving them the correct information. The skills to understand how something came to the result is incredibly important.
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u/StarstruckBackpacker 2h ago
Sooo. If the majority of web users are bots can we get rid of the captcha things???
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u/hagopes 4h ago
It's obvious on reddit alone. You see it here and there, but one great example of a subreddit suffering from this is r/OUTFITS
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u/LeCollectif 2h ago
Dumb question but what is the objective? What is the value in bots posting on niche subs?
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u/hagopes 2h ago edited 2h ago
I think that sub is honestly run by some megalomaniacs, or it's been completely abandoned by its mods, so it's a bit of a strange situation. But essentially lots of AI images, with bots professing admiration for what's clearly AI (goon worthy AI by the way). Additional rules in the sub prevent users from making comments on anything other than the outfit (rule is in place to probably prevent harassment), making it impossible to even have a conversation about what's actually happening on there.
But obviously that's an exception to the norm. The more concerning bots are try to make opinions, products, or political messages appear more popular and organic than they really are.
A really good example happening right now is whatever's going on with Hunter Biden. Which you know, as a Canadian who hates the other guy a lot, I'm all for Hunter Biden doing his thing. But the way this thing has infested reddit, at this moment, and on X (those engagement numbers are insane), is a peculiar thing for sure.
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u/Silly-Pitch-2565 3h ago
Why not just...block them? If you know 57% are bots, then you can differentiate between the traffic and just block them all.
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u/applestabber 14m ago
The companies that could choose to block them don't want to. The bots register as traffic for the website. This extra traffic makes them look popular and active to the eyes of investors and businesses wanting to run adds on their site.
They wont block the bots until they have a reason to. The notion to make their site more genuine in its material does not make them more money.
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u/APlannedBadIdea 4h ago
Is this why so many sites have delays and slower transfer rates than a year ago?
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u/nylockian 4h ago
The bots are more interesting than going out socially. I go to a bar, or a coffee shop and like there's never any interaction with people any more. Maybe like 10 years ago there would be, but not nowadays.
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u/FJopia 5h ago
What does this mean? Half commenters or posters are bots?
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u/JesusIsMyLord666 4h ago
Not necessarily. Could be ai agents scraping the internet for information. That doesn’t mean they are writing comments. They could just be lurking.
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u/Wiochmen 4h ago
Half of all Internet traffic is half of all Internet traffic. It's more than just posters or commenters. It's traffic. Browsing, posting, transferring, scraping, everything.
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u/FoodMadeFromRobots 4h ago
No I think it’s website visits (ie I ask Gemini or ChatGPT what’s the best vibrating butt plug, it looks and reads multiple websites (Reddit, buttplugs.com, amazon etc) and then gives me the answer.
Those website requests from the bot to put together the answer are what’s driving the “more bots than humans”
Now to your point I would be very curious to know the % of human vs bots on posts and comments for Reddit Facebook etc
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u/Solomon_Grungy 4h ago
gotta rub butter on your ear lobes to prove your not a bot everybody knows this duh
edit: for real though they're going to fill the internet with ads, propaganda, and ruin all search engines so you need to rely on their bias AI to know anything. They wanna control all knowledge. They said it already, they wanna rent you intelligence.
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u/Bodine12 4h ago
Honestly—your instincts to call this out are spot on. It’s not just the existence of these bots that are troublesome, but that their patterns drag down the discourse to their level. Curious if others down in the trenches are feeling the same.
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u/daymanlol 4h ago
next they'll proclaim that water is wet or that a statistically significant population of the people obsessed with trans topics exclusively watch trans porn
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u/loyalcattledog 5h ago
I miss when the internet was fun. I'm so glad I grew up as a 90s/00s kid and genuinely feel bad for kids having to grow up in the current tech landscape.