6 ms·
Bot vs human traffic
- ryanschaefer 4mo ago“First time” The graph seems like it only goes back to April 27 and on that day it was 57% bot…
- sheepscreek 4mo agoI think it’s meant as “for the first time in history..”. Not today in particular, but as a milestone.
- embedding-shape 4mo agoMaybe "first time on a weekday"? Asit seems it's been above 60% every weekend since they started monitoring it.
- vaylian 4mo agoGiven how many rounds of captchas I have to fight through, I'm not sure if these numbers are accurate.
- elaus 4mo agoYou have to fight, for some bots it might not be a real fight anymore...
- layer8 4mo agoCaptchas are part of the traffic. ;)
- asdff 4mo agoFunny how I get captcha looped with my adblocking in firefox but you can just get through easily with a few puppeteer plugins controlling headless chrome.
- dawnerd 4mo agoTrivial to bypass though, the big players just haven't gone that far yet.
- dylan604 4mo agoThat's why the human traffic numbers are so low. They just get frustrated with the CAPTCHAs and close the tab. So maybe accurate after all???
- InfiniteVortex 4mo agoDead internet theory
- tonymet 4mo agowhat comes after death? more like dead -> dead -> dead internet
- sph 4mo agoWikipedia no longer calls it a 'conspiracy theory'. I guess it's confirmed then.
- tonymet 4mo agofascinating ebb and flow of what qualifies as a conspiracy theory
- tonymet 4mo ago> while the "strong" version of the theory asserts that society itself collapsed because of some catastrophic event, and some entity (perhaps aliens or highly advanced artificial intelligence[31]) is keeping people connected to the internet to disguise this reality. new can of worms unlocked, thanks!
- giancarlostoro 4mo agoGiven how most of the internet is on mobile, I wonder how much that would skew this.
- asdff 4mo agoFor the first time? No way. People were saying this 5, 10, 15+ years ago.
- Shank 4mo agoAutomated systems that don’t sleep and are often programmed to aggressively scrape and are limited only by compute capacity outstripped humanity? I am not surprised by this at all.
- Waterluvian 4mo agoWe're the "retail users" of the Web.
- EarlKing 4mo agoIf they were truly this accurate at identifying sources of bot traffic, you'd think they'd be better at blocking them without inconveniencing the rest of us.
- deafpolygon 4mo agoDead internet theory gaining more credibility with every passing day.
- layer8 4mo agoOnly for HTML content. Total traffic would have been surprising.
- 01284a7e 4mo agoAccording to the Thales Bad Bot Report, in 2025 >53% of traffic came from bots. 2024 was 50 - 50, and in 2013, it was measured at 43%. AI-driven* bot activity has increased more than tenfold however in the past 12 months so I'm confident this will grow to a very solid majority.
- pixelesque 4mo ago> and in 2013, it was measured at 43%. Do you mean 2013 or 2023?
- 01284a7e 4mo agoI mean, just for a reference point, 2013. 2013 was the first year they did the report.
- tonymet 4mo agoOP: please add [2012] to the title
- jawns 4mo agoIt's a silly metric. There could be only one master bot that pings every known endpoint multiple times a second, and that would probably surpass all human activity, too. It doesn't really tell us much about intention or the ability to masquerade as humans. Where I would start to worry is if there's evidence that bot access patterns are starting to become harder to distinguish from human access patterns, which would suggest that they are, in fact, mimicking or masquerading as humans. I don't care how many search bots are indexing web content, but I do worry about how many social bots are attempting to manipulate or mislead people.
- al_borland 4mo agoLooking at the verified bots section, all the top bots are web crawlers, which have been around for decades, to your point.
- axegon_ 4mo ago[flagged]
- 01284a7e 4mo agoThales Bad Bot Report categorizes the traffic between "good" and "bad" bots. I would add that AI dramatically blurs the line between legitimate and malicious, and the intent generally speaking. In regards to social bots, there's a 2024 study of over 1 million accounts on X and over 60% were found likely to be bots. Curiously, when Musk took over Twitter, the "Blue Checkmark" became something that can be bought for several bucks a month (with crypto, even), without any sort of verification.
- RobRivera 4mo ago>but I do worry about how many social bots are attempting to manipulate or mislead people. You should browse reddit sometime. The easy ones to spot just autocreate accounts using the autoname at signup, which is of the formfactor [word1][word2]/d{4} Regex nazis please spare me, I am doing my bestest
- dylan604 4mo ago
- conductr 4mo agoAny thoughts on why ~30% of HTTP request are in US? I know we had first mover advantage for awhile but I'd expect this to have been diluted by larger populations by now. It doesn't appear to be AI/bot driven either.
- yacin 4mo agomy first guess would be a decent chunk of things bot operators want to scrape are in the US. might as well have your bot nearer to the source.
- arbol 4mo agoIs it not just a case of most of their clients being US based?
- chadgpt3 4mo agoNetwork effect feedback. Cheap hosting in the US because servers are there, more servers are there because of demand for hosting. AWS is there - similar reasons. Big Tech had more time to develop there and eclipsed other countries' tech.
- tushar-r 4mo agoI was tracking this as part of an older job and this has been the case for some years now - started around the Covid time with all the scalping bots etc and has just been building up. This sorta mirrors the early-mid 2010's when people[1] were worried about how much of the internet was streaming traffic. [1] Mostly ISP's annoyed at not being able to monetize it and folks trying to sell monetization solutions to them - https://www.sandvine.com/hubfs/Sandvine_Redesign_2019/Downloads/Internet%20Phenomena/2012-2h-global-internet-phenomena-report.pdf https://www.sandvine.com/hubfs/Sandvine_Redesign_2019/Downlo...
- vinyl7 4mo agoI'm looking forward to the fraud lawsuites for ad companies
- giancarlostoro 4mo agoWould love to see it go further back and some meaningful metric of how much is web scrapers vs bots.
- 0x59 4mo agoCF posts metrics which reinforces their business... shocking
- Symbiote 4mo agoIt's not Cloudflare's title, the submitted invented it.
- 0x59 4mo agoSorry for the confusion, I was pointing out that the submitter submitted something silly and not that CF is boosting its business.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4mo agoThe submitter submitted a link to #bot-vs-human , the tile of which is > Bot vs. Human
- Symbiote 4mo agoThe original submitted title (when I commented) was something like "Bots overtake human traffic for the first time".
- yjftsjthsd-h 4mo agoAh, I missed that. Then yes, I'm with you. I wish HN showed an edit history on titles:/
- dietr1ch 4mo agoNot shocking if CF is now trying really hard to keep me out of the internet
- system2 4mo agoCan bot traffic cause ad revenue to go up by any chance? Or false clicks that cost advertisers?
- chadgpt3 4mo agoOnly if the bot is designed to commit ad fraud. Normal bots are obvious to ad networks.
- jmaw 4mo agoThis feels like a vibe-coded dashboard that someone made just because they could and with AI it is much cheaper/quicker to create. But they didn't actually put too much thought into how it would/could actually be used. This doesn't really provide much value over "well that's kind of interesting to know". There aren't really actionable points that one can take from looking at these charts. Some of my opinion above is formed from my own experience making similar charts just because I wonder what something would look like graphed out :)
- BugsJustFindMe 4mo agoBot traffic Share of HTTP requests Ranking Location Percentage 1. Gibraltar 92.0% 2. Iran 76.9% 3. Singapore 76.4% 4. Ireland 72.9% 5. Netherlands 68.8% Lol, what is happening?
- oh_fiddlesticks 4mo agoGib probably has a handful of servers scraping, but the place is so small, it almost it eclipses normal traffic
- badmonkey0001 4mo agoTiny peninsula; Six datacenters The geology of the area seems to make for good cooling and DR sturdiness. One DC is even 500 meters under rock. https://www.datacentermap.com/gibraltar/gibraltar/ https://www.datacentermap.com/gibraltar/gibraltar/ https://www.datacentermap.com/gibraltar/gibraltar/continent8-gibraltar/ https://www.datacentermap.com/gibraltar/gibraltar/continent8...
- mh- 4mo agoI'm also quite skeptical of the IP databases ability to get this correct in border regions. All of Gibraltar is, necessarily, near its borders.
- tpetry 4mo agoI do understand why all of those bot scores are so high. But netherlands? Are there big datacenter providers I dont know of that are used by bots?
- ChrisArchitect 4mo agoOn the Traffic page it is showing Bots more than Human, but on the Bot page it's the opposite: 65.9% Human vs 34.1% Bot https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots?dateRange=7d https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots?dateRange=7d ?
- nemothekid 4mo agoOne funny thing I've discovered as a result of certificate transparency logs is that the second your host gets given an SSL cert, you are immediately blasted with ai crawlers. I put a project online - it was online for a month, and the second I added an SSL cert it went from 0 traffic to 1000 requests/min.
- CyberDildonics 4mo agoMake a new certificate, let crawlers blast you and add those IPs to a block list.
- nikcub 4mo agothese old network security techniques don't really work anymore. the common bots are at known IP ranges, the problem bots are all on datacenter + residential proxies.
- CyberDildonics 4mo agoWhy would blocking those be a problem?
- nikcub 4mo agothere are 150M+ of them and you'll be taking out a lot of human users with it modern blocking is behaviour / heuristic based
- CyberDildonics 4mo agoThere are 150 million bots all using residential IP addresses?
- chadgpt3 4mo agobecause you are blocking all of Comcast, Verizon, T-Mobile, British Telecom, .... at the end you have blocked every network with human visitors and only datacenter IPs can access your site. The proxies rotate IP every day, so you either have ineffective blocking or you block the whole network.
- devdoc83 4mo agoSaw this play out firsthand this week. Launched a small developer tool and within 48 hours had traffic from 38 countries — Netherlands and Singapore near the top, which matches the bot-heavy regions in this data. The SSL cert observation in another comment here is accurate too. The second a domain goes live it gets discovered.
- dmaso191 4mo ago[flagged]
- yjftsjthsd-h 4mo ago> Percentage of HTTP requests classified as bot (automated) or human. Filtered to HTML responses, representing web page traffic. (Emphasis mine) I realize that this is likely an inherent limitation, but there is a difference between "bot vs human traffic" and "traffic that CF thinks is bot/human". Every time CF blocks me, I assume it claims I'm a bot in this chart.
- nikcub 4mo agoCloudflare are more likely to be undercounting bots - they don't really pick up many of the modern browser-driven bots and crawlers.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4mo agoI'm quite happy to believe that it's unreliable in both directions.
- graemep 4mo agoI do sometimes get blocked as a bot. I have no idea how many false positives there are, but there are some and CF does assume there are none in all their numbers (e.g. email saying they block x bots).
- yjftsjthsd-h 4mo agoYes, one of my favorite memories of CF is getting blocked and then almost immediately getting an email where they bragged how many bad actors they blocked. Like... do you? Are you sure?
- greatgib 4mo agoIn this graph, "api request" traffic looks like to be conflated to be "bot".
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- xtiansimon 4mo agoHa! More electricity than candles and gaslight. More steam power and automobiles than horses…more bicycles and pedestrians than cars and trucks—-well.
- jibaoproxy 4mo ago[flagged]