According to report Imperva Bad Bot Report from Thales, almost half of all global internet traffic in 2023 was generated by bots. This level of bot activity is the highest since automated traffic monitoring began in 2013.

While some bots perform useful functions such as indexing web pages, most are designed for malicious purposes. The percentage of web traffic associated with malicious bots gradually continues to grow: in 2022 it was 30.2%, and in 2023 it has already reached 32%.

The report also shows thatthe share of real user traffic has dropped to 50.4% in 2023.Automated traffic costs companies billions of dollars in losses every year due to attacks on websites, APIs and programs.

The report also warns of an increase in AI-related bot activity. It found that the rapidadoption of generative artificial intelligence and large language models has led to an increase in the number of simple bots to 39.6% in 2023 from 33.4% in 2022

The report identified several key trends. On average, global traffic from malicious bots reached 32%. Most:

• in Ireland (71%);
• in Germany (67.5%);
• in Mexico (42.8%).

In addition, 17% of them were malicious bots that looked for system vulnerabilities to gain access to sensitive data or user accounts. Bots are leading to an increase in attacks on accounts, including attacks on application programming interfaces.

The largest share of malicious bots is present in the following areas:

• games (57.2%);
• retail trade (24.4%);
• travel (20.7%);
• financial services (15.7%).