Automation is growing eight times faster than human traffic, forcing organisations to move beyond bot mitigation toward a new trust layer that distinguishes beneficial AI agents from malicious activity
LONDON, April 09, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- HUMAN Security, Inc., the trust layer for digital customer experiences in the agentic era, today announced the findings from its 2026 State of AI Traffic & Cyberthreat Benchmark Report. This year's report reveals that the digital landscape is undergoing a profound transformation, automated traffic is growing eight times faster than human traffic, and the makeup of that automation is shifting, with AI systems now participating in digital commerce.
In 2025, HUMAN's Defense Platform analysed more than one quadrillion digital interactions, revealing an internet increasingly shaped by the rapid rise of AI-driven traffic-up 187% from January to December-and a growing diversity of automation behind it. Once a niche category, AI agents are now a measurable commercial force, with activity concentrated in high-impact sectors like retail and e-commerce, streaming and media, and travel and hospitality. As these agents become more capable, they are beginning to transact on behalf of users, further accelerating their influence on digital ecosystems. At the same time, the line between benign and malicious automation continues to narrow, fundamentally shifting how we evaluate online activity-from simply asking "bot or not" to a more critical question: "trust or not."
"As automation accelerates and begins to outpace human activity, we're witnessing a fundamental shift in how the internet operates," said Stu Solomon, CEO at HUMAN. "AI-driven traffic is no longer experimental-it's becoming embedded in core digital customer experiences, particularly in industries like e-commerce, media, and travel where agentic adoption is moving fastest. As these systems evolve from browsing to transacting, they are redefining online engagement and raising the stakes for how businesses understand and manage the traffic coming to their platforms."
Here are the key findings highlighting the rapid growth of AI-driven traffic and the increasing sophistication of automation across the digital ecosystem:
- Automated traffic across the internet is growing faster than human traffic. In 2025, automated traffic across the internet grew 23.51% year over year, while human traffic increased 3.10% over the same period. Monthly AI-driven traffic rates grew 187%, nearly tripling over the calendar year. More than 95% of this AI-driven automation is concentrated in three verticals: retail & e-commerce, streaming & media, and travel & hospitality, as those industries' customers have been among the earliest and fastest adopters of agentic solutions.
- Agentic AI is a novel category growing at an unprecedented rate. Traffic from AI agents and agentic browsers grew 7,851% year over year. And while the majority are exploring product listings, a growing number are accessing user accounts and checkout processes.
- AI-driven automation is diversifying. Training crawlers make up the majority at 67.5% of AI-driven traffic, but their share declined sharply throughout the year as traffic from AI scrapers grew 597%. AI-powered search and news summarisation products need a constant stream of freshly published content, making media the primary target. 41% of AI scraper traffic is targeting media and streaming websites, while 37% is targeting E-commerce.
- Cyber threats are getting more complex. On average, HUMAN customers experienced more than 400,000 attempted post-login account compromise attacks, a sophisticated type of account takeover (ATO) attack.This number is more than quadruple that of 2024. The share of login traffic attempting an ATO saw its biggest jump in years, particularly from EMEA, where it exceeded 13%, compared to less than 3.5% globally. HUMAN telemetry found consistently higher attack rates in EMEA-based traffic across all observed threat categories.
- Retail and e-commerce are a top targetfor attackers. This industry topped the list by large margins for the highest volume of attempted scraping, carding, and ATO attacks. A solid 70% of all observed scraping attacks targeted retail and e-commerce businesses. HUMAN's new Threat Tracker capability also revealed that more than 440,000 unique threat profiles targeted retail and e-commerce businesses in 2025, more than four times the next-highest total.
"Unquestionably trusting novel technology like agentic AI could lead to risks such as compromised credentials, data misuse, and unintended consequences when shopping," said Lindsay Kaye, Vice President of Threat Intelligence, HUMAN Security. "Organisations need unparalleled visibility into agentic and other emerging technologies to understand the benefits and risks and make informed, case-by-case decisions."
As 2026 progresses, the challenge for organisations is no longer just managing bot volume but distinguishing between legitimate AI commerce and sophisticated abuse. The report data suggests that while automation is growing for both good and ill, the patterns are identifiable. Success in this new era requires moving beyond static identity-based controls toward continuous behavioral validation across the entire session lifecycle to establish trust.
To download the full copy of HUMAN Security's 2026 State of AI Traffic & Cyberthreat Benchmark Report, please visit here.
About HUMAN:
HUMAN Security is the global leader in Agentic Trust, the emerging discipline that informs and governs how humans, bots, and AI agents operate online. For more than a decade, HUMAN has specialized in understanding and mitigating synthetic traffic risk at internet scale, protecting the world's largest brands, advertising platforms, and commerce networks. Today, HUMAN helps enterprises, platforms, and digital ecosystems verify digital interactions and establish trust across the entire customer journey - from first ad impression to final transaction. Powered by one of the world's largest behavioral signal networks, HUMAN analyzes over a quadrillion digital interactions each year to distinguish legitimate activity from fraud, abuse, and automated manipulation.
HUMAN delivers a unified trust layer for the agentic era - bridging security, marketing, and media with shared visibility, governance, and confidence in a world where humans and AI agents operate side by side. Learn more at humansecurity.com.
Contact information:
Masha Krylova, Director of Communications
press@humansecurity.com
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