Nearly half of all internet traffic can now be attributed to AI bots, a new report revealed late last month, with two-thirds of those bots functioning for malicious purposes. The report, compiled by cloud computing giant Akamai Technologies, highlights the ever-escalating threat that automated web-scraping bots pose to the online retail industry.
According to Akamai’s annual “State of the Internet” report, entitled Scraping Away Your Bottom Line: How Web Scrapers Impact E-Commerce, malicious bot activity has skyrocketed in recent years as the internet becomes increasingly automated. As the company states, “bots compose 42% of overall web traffic, and 65% of these bots are malicious.”
While online bots can be used by businesses for legitimate reasons, they are far more commonly used for “competitive intelligence and espionage, inventory hoarding, imposter site creation, and other schemes that have a negative impact on both the bottom line and the customer experience.” This is particularly prevalent in the e-commerce sector, where revenue-generating web applications are often left open to high-risk bot traffic.
While 42 percent bot activity is actually lower than what was discovered in previous studies, the key issue is the widespread use of AI botnets rather than human-controlled internet traffic farming. AI can discover and scrape unstructured data in a less consistent format or location, and its ability to incorporate gathered information into its learning process makes it a more formidable threat. Additionally, AI’s advanced decision-making can make it more difficult for humans to detect.
If I check my spam folder for comments, you’d think it was even higher
Delusions of Adequacy 