Half operation practical, it is not created by humans that do something online, but programs that do something else in an automated way. And sometimes they do it for illegal purposes.
Imperva Bad Bot Report 2024
The data we are talking about is that Imperva Bad Bot Report 2024the eleventh edition of the report, which analyzes in great detail automated web traffic. Traffic that in 2023 for 49.6% it was generated by robots, both good and bad.
Fortunately, Italy is not in the list of countries with the highest traffic generated by “not people“, which he sees above Germany with only 25.5% of traffic produced by real users. Worrying data also for Ireland (26.6%), Brazil (29.5%), United States (38.4%).
Ireland and Germany, among others, stand out in terms of the percentage of traffic generated bad robots71.4% and 67.5%.
Good robots, bad robots
There is no bot by definition neither good nor bad: is software that executes code that includes one or more Access to the Internet read or write data and generate traffic.
The difference is all in range what are they used for. Googlefor example, it works largely thanks to the gods web scanning robots it looks for new content to index, which is then displayed to the user when they search for something consistent with that content. Google couldn’t function without bots.
But other bots do far less useful and far more dangerous things like social media searches personal data about users, in order to create detailed profiles of potential users victims of fraud.
With AI, robots will grow dramatically
If it is true that we have just entered the it was an AI then it is equally true that the amount of traffic attributable to bots will increase exponentially in next years.
Bots are used to both read the billions of pieces of content posted on the web to make this possible train AI algorithms (and there are very strong allegations of copyright infringement), both for generate answers to “call” of users asking various commercial generative artificial intelligences (ChatGPT, Gemini AI, Perplexity, etc., etc.) to create content based on information found on the web.
In these cases, AI bots go to the web, find what they’re asking, and use that as a starting point to generate an answer. All this, as one can easily imagine, is only the beginning huge traffic which will be produced by bots within a few years and which could bring human generated web traffic single digit percentages.