AI bot traffic closing in on human web visits, study finds

AI bots now account for one in every 31 website visits, up dramatically from one in 200 visits earlier in 2025, while human web traffic declined 5% in just one quarter. The surge is primarily driven by retrieval augmented generation (RAG) bots that extract real-time information for AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini, as 37% of AI users now bypass traditional search engines. Meanwhile, clickthrough rates from AI apps to source websites plummeted to just 0.27%, threatening publishers' revenue streams and suggesting the internet may become bot-dominated within the year.