More than half of all internet traffic now comes from bots, analysts say, and for businesses, that means reaching customers may be more challenging than ever. The flood of artificial intelligence-powered bots is forcing small businesses especially to find new strategies to make human connections.

“When traffic is overblown, making advertising decisions becomes impossible,” business owner Cameron Figgins told The Epoch Times. “I’ve seen monthly analytics with 30 [to] 40 percent of site visits as non-human.”

Figgins owns Absolute Maintenance and Consulting, a California company that specializes in remediating mold and water damage. He said the flood of AI bots visiting his company’s website costs real-world money.

“Imagine that you’re spending $2,000 a month on paid ads, with one third of your clicks being bots. You’re wasting $600 to $700 a month with nothing to show for it,” he said.

Business owner Ilya Ornatov said he’s having the same problem.

“I run a house-cleaning business, but our website is basically our No. 1 salesperson,” Ornatov, the owner of NW Maids, told The Epoch Times.

“For a small local business, the biggest impact is that the bot traffic makes it really hard to tell what’s actually working. Our website is where most of our new customers come from, so I watch the numbers closely, and a chunk of that traffic is just bots crawling the site, not real people who might book a cleaning.”

Like Figgins, Ornatov said paying for advertising makes less and less sense when the audience is mostly automated. “You’re literally paying for fake visits, so you can burn money without a single real customer to show for it,” he said.

There’s growing evidence to back these claims, especially now that many tech insiders believe the internet has crossed the inversion point, or the moment when human web traffic officially became less than that of bots.

Cybersecurity firm Imperva found in its “2026 Bad Bot Report” that 53 percent of all web traffic in 2025 came from bots.

And the ratio of bots to humans is increasing. On Aug. 18, 63 percent of all HTTP requests came from bots, according to Cloudflare’s global tracker.

Beyond the Numbers

Tech insiders say bot domination creates trouble by obscuring human behavior.

“The biggest impact is that businesses are losing visibility of actual customer behavior,” Naveen Ayalla, a senior data engineer at Microsoft, told The Epoch Times.

Ayalla said an e-commerce company might mistake a 30 percent traffic spike from AI crawlers for a successful marketing campaign. That distorts marketing reports and creates unnecessary infrastructure costs, which can lead to poor investment decisions based on misleading data.

“Traditional analytics assume most visitors are human, which is no longer reliable,” Ayalla said. “A new product page might receive thousands of views from AI bots indexing content without any intent to purchase, creating false engagement.”

To counter this, Ayalla said businesses must shift their focus from superficial metrics such as page views and clicks to deep funnel signals, or actions by potential customers that indicate genuine intent. Those include purchases, completed forms, long-term retention, and more.

Not All Bots Are Equal

Not all automated traffic is harming businesses. In fact, some of it is helping to create connections with real customers.

A growing number of people are asking large language models such as ChatGPT for recommendations on goods and services. AI-recommended brands are “significantly more likely” to see a human website visit, according to a SimilarWeb analysis. On average, researchers found that ChatGPT users were two-and-a-half times more likely to engage with an AI-recommended brand over its competition.

Ayalla said blocking all bots from visiting a website isn’t a realistic approach, given the technology’s rising importance in connecting with potential clients.

“Businesses need a balanced approach to maintain visibility in AI-powered search while protecting their infrastructure and content,” he said.

When asked how companies can blunt the impact of bad bots, Ayalla predicts it won’t be a “binary choice” in the future, but about more layered access controls.

“We will likely see a clear separation where general information remains accessible to AI systems, while high-value, proprietary data requires authenticated access,” he said.

“The focus will ultimately shift from blocking AI to safely collaborating with it.”

—Autumn Spredemann; Stacy Robinson

BOOKMARKS

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Judge John Roach, who presided over Karmelo Anthony’s murder trial, has been ordered to recuse himself from further proceedings. Anthony is seeking a retrial, and his attorneys felt the judge was biased.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is proposing new rules that would prevent illegal immigrants from collecting refunds on certain tax credits. Check out Timothy Frudd’s latest report for more.

Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) prevailed over Oliver Larkin, a union organizer endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America in Florida’s House primary race this week. Moskowitz currently holds a seat in the 23rd district but will challenge for the 25th district this fall.

A food bank in Arizona received around 183,600 eggs this week as part of a federal and multistate settlement over alleged price-fixing by egg producers. “This delivery is proof that when companies break the law and drive up costs for Arizonans, we will hold them accountable and get real relief for Arizonans,” state Attorney General Kris Mayes said in a statement.

—Stacy Robinson