Malicious automated internet traffic is growing more than nine times faster than human traffic, while AI bots are increasingly accessing login pages and other sensitive areas of websites, according to a report released Tuesday by a bot and agent trust management company.
The report (registration required) by DataDome , based on more than a trillion requests across 75,000 customer sites and tests of more than 20,000 popular websites, found that bad bot traffic increased 124% between July 2025 and June 2026.
During the first half of 2026, AI bot requests to website login pages increased more than eightfold.
"Automated traffic isn't just a volume problem at the edge of the internet anymore," DataDome Vice President of Threat Research Jérôme Segura said in a statement. "It's growing fast, and it's going deeper."
"For businesses," he continued, "the challenge is no longer simply identifying automation; it is determining whether that activity is beneficial or harmful."
Segura told TechNewsWorld that several developments likely contributed to the increase in bot traffic.
"Automated scraping tools continued to multiply as demand grew for web data used in AI model training, agent responses and other AI services," he explained.
"At the same time, anti-fingerprinting frameworks, automated browsers and low-cost bot-as-a-service platforms made sophisticated evasion more accessible," he added, "and AI is also making these tools faster and cheaper to build."
According to the DataDome report, scraping, which increased 185.2% during the reporting period, is the largest and fastest-growing attack vector, accounting for 70.9% of bad bot traffic across DataDome’s customer base.
"That 185% year-over-year jump in scraping is agents fetching answers off pages built for people," explained Jacob Krell, senior director for secure AI solutions and cybersecurity at Suzu Labs , a provider of AI-powered cybersecurity services in Las Vegas.
"AI search, research tooling, competitive intelligence and old scrapers can all generate continuous page fetches," he told TechNewsWorld. "One human question can turn into requests against multiple pages or sites. That is machine-level demand on human-sized infrastructure, with more room for content theft, price scraping and unauthorized data collection."
Ensar Seker, CISO of SOCRadar , a threat intelligence company in Newark, Del., asserted that the 185% increase in scraping is significant because scraping is no longer just about copying public website content.
"Automated systems can collect product data, pricing, intellectual property, proprietary research, and other commercially valuable information at enormous scale," he told TechNewsWorld. "AI has also increased the economic value of large datasets because information can be collected for model training, retrieval systems and competitive intelligence."
Scraping can harm businesses, he added, because aggressive scraping can create infrastructure costs, distort analytics, and potentially undermine the commercial value of the data and content they produce.
Krell fingered agentic browser usage as another development pushing the volume up.
"Models could already plan a sequence of actions," he said. "Vision models and browser-control tooling made it practical to run that plan against a normal website. An agent can read the rendered page, locate controls, fill forms, and click through a workflow at machine scale."
Seker added that generative AI has contributed to vol…