The 2026 State of AI Traffic & Cyberthreat Benchmark Report

In 2025, the Human Defense Platform processed more than one quadrillion interactions across its global customer base. Researchers analyzed that data to surface a fundamental shift in how the internet operates: automated traffic—all non-human internet traffic—is growing eight times faster than human traffic, AI-driven traffic—traffic generated by or on behalf of AI systems—is the fastest-growing category of internet traffic, and for the first time, AI systems are not just reading the web but transacting on it. Key findings include:

• Automated traffic grew 8x faster than human traffic, year over year.
• Monthly volumes of AI-driven traffic grew 187% from January to December 2025, nearly tripling over the calendar year.
• Traffic from AI agents and agentic browsers grew 7,851% year over year.
•  More than 95% of AI-driven traffic in 2025 was concentrated in three industries: retail and e-commerce, streaming and media, and travel and hospitality.
• The median percentage of traffic attempting a scraping attack is approaching 20% globally in 2025, nearly double the rate in 2022.
• Post-login account compromise attempts more than quadrupled year over year, with HUMAN flagging an average of 402,000 per organization.