Viral virtual OpenClaw assistant — formerly known as Moltbot and before that Clawdbot — is emblematic of a broader revolution underway that could fundamentally change the way the Internet works. Instead of a place inhabited mainly by humans, the network may soon be dominated by autonomous AI bots.
AND new report Measurement of bot activity across the Internet, as well as related data shared with WIRED by Akamai, an internet infrastructure company, shows that AI bots already account for a significant portion of web traffic. The findings also shed lithe on an increasingly sophisticated arms race in which bots utilize clever tactics to bypass website security measures designed to stop them.
“In the future, most of the Internet traffic will be generated by bots,” says Toshit Pangrahi, co-founder and CEO of TollBit, a company that tracks web browsing activity, and published a fresh report. “It’s not just a copyright issue, there’s a new user on the Internet.”
Most immense websites try to limit the content that bots can download and upload to AI systems for training purposes. (WIRED’s parent company Condé Nast, as well as other publishers, are currently suing several AI companies over alleged copyright infringement related to AI training.)
However, another type of website scraping related to artificial intelligence is also growing in popularity today. Many chatbots and other artificial intelligence tools can now pull real-time information from the Internet and utilize it to enhance and improve their performance. This may include current product prices, cinema schedules or summaries of the latest news.
According to Akamai data, training-related bot traffic has been steadily growing since July last year. Meanwhile, global bot activity downloading web content for AI agents is also growing.
“Artificial intelligence is changing the web as we know it,” Robert Blumofe, Akamai’s chief technology officer, tells WIRED. “The arms race that will follow will determine the future look, feel, and functionality of the network, as well as the fundamentals of doing business.”
TollBit estimates that in the fourth quarter of 2025, TollBit estimated that on average one in 50 visits to its clients’ websites came from an artificial intelligence collection bot. In the first three months of 2025, that figure was just one in 200. The company says that in the fourth quarter, more than 13 percent of bot requests bypassed robots.txt, a file used by some sites to indicate pages that bots should avoid. TollBit claims that the share of AI bots ignoring the robots.txt file has increased by 400 percent compared to the second quarter of last year.
TollBit has also seen a 336% raise in the number of websites attempting to block AI bots over the past year. Pangrahi says scraping techniques are becoming more sophisticated as sites try to take control of how bots access their content. Some bots disguise themselves by appearing to come from a regular web browser, or send requests designed to mimic the way humans typically interact with websites. TollBit research shows that the behavior of some AI agents is now almost indistinguishable from human network traffic.
TollBit Markets tools which website owners can utilize to charge AI scrapers for access to their content. Other companies, including Cloudflare, offer similar tools. “Anyone who relies on people’s online traffic — starting with publishers, but basically everyone — will feel the impact,” Pangrahi says. “We need a faster way to programmatically exchange value between machines.”