What percentage of internet traffic is bots?
Roughly half, by some measures. Imperva's 2025 Bad Bot Report found automated traffic made up 51% of all web traffic in 2024, overtaking human traffic for the first time, with "bad bots" alone at 37%. That is all web requests, not ads specifically; the invalid share of measured ad impressions is usually far lower because much of it is filtered.
Figures like Imperva's describe everything hitting websites: search crawlers, uptime monitors, price scrapers, AI crawlers and malicious bots. Ad-specific IVT rate figures reported by ad verification vendors are typically single-digit percentages for protected campaigns, because known GIVT is removed first and buyers avoid the worst supply. Unprotected buys, cheap open-exchange inventory and some CTV and in-app segments can run much higher.
The rise of generative-AI tools has made bot traffic cheaper to produce and more human-looking, and residential proxy networks let bots borrow real home IP addresses. That is why detection has shifted from simple blocklists toward behavioral analysis and device-level signals.