Nearly half of all internet traffic can now be attributed to AI bots, a new report revealed late last month, with two-thirds of those bots functioning for malicious purposes. The report, compiled by cloud computing giant Akamai Technologies, highlights the ever-escalating threat that automated web-scraping bots pose to the online retail industry.
According to Akamai’s annual “State of the Internet” report, entitled Scraping Away Your Bottom Line: How Web Scrapers Impact E-Commerce, malicious bot activity has skyrocketed in recent years as the internet becomes increasingly automated. As the company states, “bots compose 42% of overall web traffic, and 65% of these bots are malicious.”
While online bots can be used by businesses for legitimate reasons, they are far more commonly used for “competitive intelligence and espionage, inventory hoarding, imposter site creation, and other schemes that have a negative impact on both the bottom line and the customer experience.” This is particularly prevalent in the e-commerce sector, where revenue-generating web applications are often left open to high-risk bot traffic.
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While 42 percent bot activity is actually lower than what was discovered in previous studies, the key issue is the widespread use of AI botnets rather than human-controlled internet traffic farming. AI can discover and scrape unstructured data in a less consistent format or location, and its ability to incorporate gathered information into its learning process makes it a more formidable threat. Additionally, AI’s advanced decision-making can make it more difficult for humans to detect.
Scraper bots, which strip content off a given website to create counterfeit storefronts or generate phishing content, remain a constant problem online as well, resulting in stolen login credentials and credit card information. Other bots are used to flood online queues for new product releases, buying up limited edition shoes, new electronics, and in-demand concert tickets for resale before human customers ever even see the items.
“Bots continue to present massive challenges resulting in multiple pain points for app and API owners,” said Patrick Sullivan, CTO of Security Strategy at Akamai. “This includes scraping that can steal web data and produce brand impersonation sites. The scraper landscape is also changing due to advancements like headless browser technology, requiring organizations to take an approach to managing this type of bot activity that is more sophisticated than other JavaScript-based mitigations.”
Despite the severity of the problem, Akamai notes that “there are no existing laws that prohibit the use of scraper bots,” meaning that companies can only take steps to mitigate their negative effects. The company advises robust defensive strategies to defend user data and protect against fraud losses.
The explosion of AI bot activity online has also fed into the so-called “Dead Internet Theory,” the belief that the digital world has been operated almost entirely by bots and automated algorithms for the better part of a decade with the goal of manipulating the population. Though internet experts have dismissed the theory—or at least downplayed its severity—proponents point to the spread of Large Language Models like ChatGPT to argue that organic, human-made content is quickly dying out.
Connor Walcott is a staff writer for Valuetainment.com. Follow Connor on X and look for him on VT’s “The Unusual Suspects.”
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