The viral virtual assistant OpenClaw—formerly known as Moltbot, and before that Clawdbot—is a symbol of a broader revolution underway that could fundamentally alter how the internet functions. Instead of a place primarily inhabited by humans, the web may very soon be dominated by autonomous AI bots.
A new report measuring bot activity on the web, as well as related data shared with WIRED by the internet infrastructure company Akamai, shows that AI bots already account for a meaningful share of web traffic. The findings also shed light on an increasingly sophisticated arms race unfolding as bots deploy clever tactics to bypass website defenses meant to keep them out.
“The majority of the internet is going to be bot traffic in the future,” says Toshit Pangrahi, cofounder and CEO of TollBit, a company that tracks web-scraping activity and published the new report. “It’s not just a copyright problem, there is a new visitor emerging on the internet.”
Most big websites try to limit what content bots can scrape and feed 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.)
But another kind of AI-related website scraping is now on the rise as well. Many chatbots and other AI tools can now retrieve real-time information from the web and use it to augment and improve their outputs. This might include up-to-the-minute product prices, movie theater schedules, or summaries of the latest news.
According to the data from Akamai, training-related bot traffic has been rising steadily since last July. Meanwhile, global activity from bots fetching web content for AI agents is also on the upswing.
“AI is changing the web as we know it,” Robert Blumofe, Akamai’s chief technology officer, tells WIRED “The ensuing arms race will determine the future look, feel, and functionality of the web, as well as the basics of doing business.”
In the fourth quarter of 2025, TollBit estimates that an average of one out of every 31 visits to its customers’ websites was from an AI scraping bot. In the first quarter, that figure was only one out of every 200. The company says that in the fourth quarter, more than 13 percent of bot requests were bypassing robots.txt, a file that some websites use to indicate which pages bots are supposed to avoid. TollBit says the share of AI bots disregarding robots.txt increased 400 percent from the second quarter to the fourth quarter of last year.
TollBit also reported a 336 percent increase in the number of websites making attempts to block AI bots over the past year. Pangrahi says that scraping techniques are getting more sophisticated as sites try to assert control over how bots access their content. Some bots disguise themselves by making their traffic appear like it’s coming from a normal web browser or send requests designed to mimic how humans normally interact with websites. TollBit’s study notes that the behavior of some AI agents is now almost indistinguishable from human web traffic.
TollBit markets tools that website owners can use to charge AI scrapers for accessing their content. Other firms, including Cloudflare, offer similar tools. “Anyone who relies on human web traffic—starting with publishers, but basically everyone—is going to be impacted,” Pangrahi says. “There needs to be a faster way to have that machine-to-machine, programmatic exchange of value.”
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