The internet is quietly transforming into a bot-dominated landscape. New data from TollBit shows AI bots now account for one out of every 50 website visits, a 400% surge from earlier in 2025. The finding reveals an escalating arms race between publishers desperate to protect their content and increasingly sophisticated AI scrapers that mimic human behavior to slip past defenses. With companies like Cloudflare and TollBit rushing to monetize bot access, the very fabric of the open web hangs in the balance.
The internet's demographic shift is happening faster than most realize. OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic aren't just training their AI models on web content anymore - their bots are now persistently crawling sites to fetch real-time information for chatbots and AI agents. According to fresh data from TollBit and internet infrastructure giant Akamai, this activity is reshaping the web's traffic patterns at an alarming pace.
In Q4 2025, TollBit estimates AI scrapers accounted for one out of every 50 visits to its customers' websites. Just nine months earlier, that ratio was one in 200. "The majority of the internet is going to be bot traffic in the future," Toshit Pangrahi, TollBit's cofounder and CEO, told Wired. "It's not just a copyright problem, there is a new visitor emerging on the internet."
The surge breaks down into two distinct categories. Training bots - the ones scraping content to build AI models - have been climbing steadily since July 2025, according to Akamai's data shared exclusively with Wired. But a newer phenomenon is accelerating even faster: retrieval bots that grab real-time information like product prices, movie showtimes, and breaking news to augment AI responses. Tools like ChatGPT's web browsing feature and the viral assistant OpenClaw (previously Moltbot, before that Clawdbot) are driving this second wave.
Robert Blumofe, Akamai's chief technology officer, frames the shift starkly. "AI is changing the web as we know it," he told Wired. "The ensuing arms race will determine the future look, feel, and functionality of the web, as well as the basics of doing business."
