In 2024, most of the global website traffic was still generated by humans, but bot traffic is constantly growing. Fraudulent traffic through bad bot actors accounted for 37 percent of global web traffic in the most recently measured period, representing an increase of 12 percent from the previous year. Sophistication of Bad Bots on the rise The complexity of malicious bot activity has dramatically increased in recent years. Advanced bad bots have doubled in prevalence over the past 2 years, indicating a surge in the sophistication of cyber threats. Simultaneously, the share of simple bad bots drastically increased over the last years, suggesting a shift in the landscape of automated threats. Meanwhile, areas like food and groceries, sports, gambling, and entertainment faced the highest amount of advanced bad bots, with more than 70 percent of their bot traffic affected by evasive applications. Good and bad bots across industries The impact of bot traffic varies across different sectors. Bad bots accounted for over 50 percent of the telecom and ISPs, community and society, and computing and IT segments web traffic. However, not all bot traffic is considered bad. Some of these applications help index websites for search engines or monitor website performance, assisting users throughout their online search. Therefore, areas like entertainment, food and groceries, and even areas targeted by bad bots themselves experienced notable levels of good bot traffic, demonstrating the diverse applications of benign automated systems across different sectors.