Self-driving cars will grow 23.5% year-over-year through 2025 — nearly eight times faster than human traffic, which is up 3.1%, according to HUMAN Security’s State of AI Traffic report.
- AI-driven traffic appears to have played a major role in that growth, with average monthly volume up 187% year-over-year, while traffic from AI agents and agent browsers (eg, OpenAI’s Atlas, Perplexity’s Comet) grew nearly 8,000% year-over-year.
- Automated traffic is defined in the report as: “All Internet traffic generated by software systems instead of human users, including standard automation such as search engine crawlers, monitoring bots, and standard scraping tools, as well as AI-driven traffic.”
- The report follows Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince’s prediction that bots could overtake human web usage by 2027.
Why do we care. Search is built more on human queries, clarity, and targeting. AI agents now participate in discovery, comparison, and services – within Google’s dynamic results and in all AI-driven environments.
Details. HUMAN groups AI-driven traffic into three broad categories:
- Training sessions that collect data for models. They still dominate at 67.5% of AI traffic, but their share is decreasing as scrapers and average agents.
- Real-time scrapers feed AI searches and answers. Scraper traffic is expected to grow nearly 600% by 2025, driven by AI-powered search and real-time response engines.
- Agent AI systems perform tasks automatically. It’s small in terms of sharing, but it grows quickly and is very disturbing.
AI agents behave like users. These systems are not limited to reading content. They increasingly navigate funnels, opt-in, and trade. By 2025:
- 77% of agent activity you noticed (requests) happened on product and search pages.
- About 9% touched on account-level communication.
- More than 2% was achieved in the exit.
About the data. HUMAN analyzed more than one million interactions (requests/events) across the customer base by 2025, with aggregated, anonymized data from 2022 to 2025. It segmented AI-driven traffic into training hosts, AI issuers, and agent AI using self-agent identification strings, user-observed behavior strings, identity strings, which might underestimate or misclassify some AI-driven activity.
Bottom line. Traffic is becoming human, and discovery is no longer limited to search engines. Optimization now means deciding which machines can access, interpret, and act on your content.
Report. The 2026 State of AI Traffic & Cyberthreat Benchmark Report
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