What percentage of internet traffic comes from bots rather than humans?

How to get close to this number

Reason from who is making requests. Every search engine crawler, every price scraper, every uptime monitor, every automated backup and every security scanner generates traffic continuously, and none of them sleeps. Machines that never stop requesting will inevitably outpace humans who do.

The malicious share in the explanation is the part that matters for anyone running a site: about a third of all traffic comes from bots classed as hostile — scrapers, credential stuffers and scalpers. Most of what reaches a small website is not a visitor and not benign.

This site's own architecture is a response to that reality. Static files with no database and no login remove almost every target a hostile bot is looking for, and the automated-visitor guard described in this project's documentation exists because a meaningful fraction of anything that loads a page is not a person.