Bots outpace humans as web traffic share hits 53 percent in 2025

The shift toward machine-dominated traffic signals a fundamental change in streaming infrastructure requirements and security posture. With bad bots nearing a plurality of all web activity, platform operators must prioritize API protection and business-logic validation over legacy signature-based defenses. The media and streaming sectors are specifically targeted because they offer high-value surfaces for credential stuffing, content scraping, and programmatic ad fraud. To maintain operational resilience, engineers must account for bot-induced infrastructure overhead that effectively doubles server load without contributing to genuine subscriber growth. Watch for a rise in 'agentic AI' traffic—automation that attempts to act as a user—which surged over 7,800% in 2025 and requires new verification tiers.

The rise of automation is hitting the streaming and media sectors with unique intensity. Per Arkose Labs in Q3 2025 reporting, streaming media attacks surged by 248% in a single quarter, with mobile-specific attacks growing by 67%. Media platforms are particularly vulnerable due to low-friction sign-up processes that attackers exploit to farm accounts for downstream fraud. Their data shows that 54% of attacks targeting media firms now originate via mobile channels, significantly higher than the 21% cross-industry average, as attackers leverage 'human sweatshops' and device farms to mimic authentic app-based interactions.

Akamai's State of the Internet report from November 2025 reinforces these findings, noting that the publishing and digital media segment accounts for 63% of all observed AI bot triggers. This concentration of activity is largely driven by aggressive content scraping by Large Language Model (LLM) crawlers seeking training data. Per Akamai, AI bot traffic alone grew by 300% in the last year, creating an environment where nearly 1% of total automated requests are attributed to specialized AI bots. This creates a dual risk: the erosion of content value through unauthorized extraction and the distortion of ad delivery metrics through invalid traffic (IVT).

Infrastructure providers are also reporting a sharp escalation in the scale of these threats. Cloudflare reported that by late 2025, automated systems generated more than half of all HTML page requests, exceeding human-generated requests by roughly 7%. This volume is often weaponized for Layer 7 DDoS attacks, which Akamai found rose by 94% between early 2023 and late 2024. These persistent HTTP floods target authentication and pricing APIs, requiring streaming platforms to adopt more sophisticated rate-limiting and behavior-based traffic classification to protect both their content and their bottom line.