The Rebel Yellow

The Rebel Yellow

AI bots now generate a growing share of internet traffic

As AI bots flood the web with scraping and search requests, publishers are facing rising costs and shrinking traffic from real human readers.

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The Rebel Yellow
Mar 23, 2026
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Image via Mikhail Nilov (Pexels)

Artificial intelligence bots are rapidly becoming a major source of traffic across the internet. A new report measuring automated web activity, along with traffic data shared with WIRED by internet infrastructure company Akamai, shows AI scraping bots now account for a measurable portion of requests to websites worldwide.…

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