Let’s hope it’s not a horrible foreshadowing of our future (we’re looking at you, Google), but gone are the days when humans created the most traffic on the internet. Stuff, for one, welcomes our new robot overlords… since bots seem to be spending more time on the net than we do these days.

To clarify, bots in this context means any non-human entity on the internet that generates its own traffic, that is, executes actions without any human input. A good example are search engines, who are classified as good bots, and these created roughly 31% of all traffic on the internet last year.

What is worrying is the amount of traffic created by bad, or rather, malicious bots. Content scrapers, hacking tools and other malicious activity also constituted roughly 30% of all internet traffic in 2013, and this should be seen as case for concern regarding online safety.

In contrast, us humans only generated 38.5% of internet traffic in 2013. Bots, combined, spent more time online than we did.

More information can be found on a new report released by Incapsula, which also gives a detailed explanation of the types of bots utilised last year.

You can check out the report here.

Source: Mashable