Human and bot web traffic share 2021

In 2021, the majority of website traffic was still generated by humans but bot traffic is constantly increasing. Fraudulent traffic through bad bot actors accounted for 27.7 percent of web traffic in the most recently measured period, representing a 2.1 percent growth from the previous year.

Distribution of bot and human web traffic worldwide from 2014 to 2021

Characteristic	Human	Good bot	Bad bot
2021	57.7%	14.6%	27.7%
2020	59.2%	15.2%	25.6%
2019	62.8%	13.1%	24.1%
2018	62.1%	17.5%	20.4%
2017	57.8%	20.4%	21.8%
2016	61.3%	18.8%	19.9%
2015	54.4%	27%	18.6%
2014	40.9%	36.3%	22.8%

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Release date

April 2022

More information

Region

Worldwide

Survey time period

2014 to 2021

Supplementary notes

According to the source, "bad bots interact with applications in the same way a legitimate user would, making them harder to detect and prevent. They enable high-speed abuse, misuse, and attacks on websites, mobile apps, and APIs. They allow bot operators, attackers, unsavory competitors, and fraudsters to perform a wide array of malicious activities. Such activities include web scraping, competitive data mining, personal and financial data harvesting, brute-force login, digital ad fraud, spam, transaction fraud, and more. [...] In simplistic terms, good bots ensure that online businesses and their products can be found by prospective customers. Examples include search engine crawlers such as GoogleBot and Bingbot that, through their indexing, help people match their queries with the most relevant sets of websites."

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