Malicious bots are growing at a startling pace as AI continues to expand. A new report from DataDome finds that from July 2025 to June of this year, bad automated traffic grew 124%. That’s nine times faster than human traffic growth during that period. AI traffic, meanwhile, increased more than 82%.

The report, based on more than 1 trillion requests across 75,000-plus customer sites, offers one of the most comprehensive looks at bot traffic online. And the bots were busy over the past year.

Scraping of sites increased more than 185%. Bots were used for scalping activity, for tickets or other high-demand items, at nearly three times the pace of the previous year. And AI bots are targeting login pages at eight times the rate they were when the 2025 report was conducted.

“Automated traffic isn’t just a volume problem at the edge of the internet anymore. It’s growing fast, and it’s going deeper: into the login, account, and transaction flows at the center of the customer journey,” says Jérôme Segura, VP of threat research at DataDome. “For businesses, the challenge is no longer simply identifying automation; it is determining whether that activity is beneficial or harmful.”

During the study period, DataDome detected 52.7 billion crawler requests from AI agents and LLMs, with more than 46% of those coming from Meta-affiliated systems. OpenAI was the second-busiest bot dispatcher, accounting for nearly 35% of the total.

The fact that bots are now moving beyond homepages and accessing login pages underscores security concerns that have been growing for some time.

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