Rendered at 02:57:29 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
nemothekid 7 hours ago [-]
One funny thing I've discovered as a result of certificate transparency logs is that the second your host gets given an SSL cert, you are immediately blasted with ai crawlers.
I put a project online - it was online for a month, and the second I added an SSL cert it went from 0 traffic to 1000 requests/min.
8cvor6j844qw_d6 3 hours ago [-]
> One funny thing I've discovered as a result of certificate transparency logs is that the second your host gets given an SSL cert
I've been thinking of using wildcard certs for Caddy in regards to this.
jgalt212 1 hours ago [-]
and then what? serve your app under some obscure / customer unfriendly subdomain?
RajT88 3 hours ago [-]
Today AI crawlers, years ago vulnerability scanners from Russia or China.
Either way! People monitor cert registries for targets.
CyberDildonics 7 hours ago [-]
Make a new certificate, let crawlers blast you and add those IPs to a block list.
nikcub 6 hours ago [-]
these old network security techniques don't really work anymore. the common bots are at known IP ranges, the problem bots are all on datacenter + residential proxies.
CyberDildonics 6 hours ago [-]
Why would blocking those be a problem?
chadgpt3 3 hours ago [-]
because you are blocking all of Comcast, Verizon, T-Mobile, British Telecom, ....
at the end you have blocked every network with human visitors and only datacenter IPs can access your site.
The proxies rotate IP every day, so you either have ineffective blocking or you block the whole network.
efilife 20 minutes ago [-]
My site is not for americans so I don't care about blocking american isps
nikcub 5 hours ago [-]
there are 150M+ of them and you'll be taking out a lot of human users with it
modern blocking is behaviour / heuristic based
mh- 6 hours ago [-]
In my experience, these aren't the crawlers from legit companies, so they have infinite IPs via residential botnets/proxies.
edit: 'nikcub beat me to it by 30 seconds :)
jawns 9 hours ago [-]
It's a silly metric. There could be only one master bot that pings every known endpoint multiple times a second, and that would probably surpass all human activity, too. It doesn't really tell us much about intention or the ability to masquerade as humans.
Where I would start to worry is if there's evidence that bot access patterns are starting to become harder to distinguish from human access patterns, which would suggest that they are, in fact, mimicking or masquerading as humans. I don't care how many search bots are indexing web content, but I do worry about how many social bots are attempting to manipulate or mislead people.
al_borland 8 hours ago [-]
Looking at the verified bots section, all the top bots are web crawlers, which have been around for decades, to your point.
01284a7e 8 hours ago [-]
Thales Bad Bot Report categorizes the traffic between "good" and "bad" bots.
I would add that AI dramatically blurs the line between legitimate and malicious, and the intent generally speaking.
In regards to social bots, there's a 2024 study of over 1 million accounts on X and over 60% were found likely to be bots. Curiously, when Musk took over Twitter, the "Blue Checkmark" became something that can be bought for several bucks a month (with crypto, even), without any sort of verification.
RobRivera 8 hours ago [-]
>but I do worry about how many social bots are attempting to manipulate or mislead people.
You should browse reddit sometime. The easy ones to spot just autocreate accounts using the autoname at signup, which is of the formfactor [word1][word2]/d{4}
Regex nazis please spare me, I am doing my bestest
dylan604 7 hours ago [-]
your bestest if just fine as your point is clear. i'd actually be just fine with pseudo code. maybe it'll poison the LLM training data if we all did it more.
axegon_ 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ryanschaefer 9 hours ago [-]
“First time”
The graph seems like it only goes back to April 27 and on that day it was 57% bot…
embedding-shape 9 hours ago [-]
Maybe "first time on a weekday"? Asit seems it's been above 60% every weekend since they started monitoring it.
sheepscreek 9 hours ago [-]
I think it’s meant as “for the first time in history..”. Not today in particular, but as a milestone.
yjftsjthsd-h 7 hours ago [-]
> Percentage of HTTP requests classified as bot (automated) or human. Filtered to HTML responses, representing web page traffic.
(Emphasis mine)
I realize that this is likely an inherent limitation, but there is a difference between "bot vs human traffic" and "traffic that CF thinks is bot/human". Every time CF blocks me, I assume it claims I'm a bot in this chart.
graemep 6 hours ago [-]
I do sometimes get blocked as a bot. I have no idea how many false positives there are, but there are some and CF does assume there are none in all their numbers (e.g. email saying they block x bots).
yjftsjthsd-h 6 hours ago [-]
Yes, one of my favorite memories of CF is getting blocked and then almost immediately getting an email where they bragged how many bad actors they blocked. Like... do you? Are you sure?
nikcub 6 hours ago [-]
Cloudflare are more likely to be undercounting bots - they don't really pick up many of the modern browser-driven bots and crawlers.
yjftsjthsd-h 6 hours ago [-]
I'm quite happy to believe that it's unreliable in both directions.
01284a7e 9 hours ago [-]
According to the Thales Bad Bot Report, in 2025 >53% of traffic came from bots. 2024 was 50 - 50, and in 2013, it was measured at 43%.
AI-driven* bot activity has increased more than tenfold however in the past 12 months so I'm confident this will grow to a very solid majority.
pixelesque 8 hours ago [-]
> and in 2013, it was measured at 43%.
Do you mean 2013 or 2023?
01284a7e 8 hours ago [-]
I mean, just for a reference point, 2013. 2013 was the first year they did the report.
asdff 9 hours ago [-]
For the first time? No way. People were saying this 5, 10, 15+ years ago.
jmaw 8 hours ago [-]
This feels like a vibe-coded dashboard that someone made just because they could and with AI it is much cheaper/quicker to create. But they didn't actually put too much thought into how it would/could actually be used. This doesn't really provide much value over "well that's kind of interesting to know". There aren't really actionable points that one can take from looking at these charts.
Some of my opinion above is formed from my own experience making similar charts just because I wonder what something would look like graphed out :)
Given how many rounds of captchas I have to fight through, I'm not sure if these numbers are accurate.
asdff 8 hours ago [-]
Funny how I get captcha looped with my adblocking in firefox but you can just get through easily with a few puppeteer plugins controlling headless chrome.
ntcho 4 hours ago [-]
Average Firefox experience right here
dylan604 7 hours ago [-]
That's why the human traffic numbers are so low. They just get frustrated with the CAPTCHAs and close the tab. So maybe accurate after all???
elaus 9 hours ago [-]
You have to fight, for some bots it might not be a real fight anymore...
dawnerd 8 hours ago [-]
Trivial to bypass though, the big players just haven't gone that far yet.
layer8 9 hours ago [-]
Captchas are part of the traffic. ;)
tushar-r 8 hours ago [-]
I was tracking this as part of an older job and this has been the case for some years now - started around the Covid time with all the scalping bots etc and has just been building up.
This sorta mirrors the early-mid 2010's when people[1] were worried about how much of the internet was streaming traffic.
what comes after death? more like dead -> dead -> dead internet
nocman 8 hours ago [-]
It's been mostly dead all morning.
Mezzie 3 hours ago [-]
Undead? Shambling along with the body of its former, living self?
Shank 9 hours ago [-]
Automated systems that don’t sleep and are often programmed to aggressively scrape and are limited only by compute capacity outstripped humanity? I am not surprised by this at all.
Waterluvian 9 hours ago [-]
We're the "retail users" of the Web.
devdoc83 7 hours ago [-]
Saw this play out firsthand this week. Launched a small
developer tool and within 48 hours had traffic from 38
countries — Netherlands and Singapore near the top,
which matches the bot-heavy regions in this data.
The SSL cert observation in another comment here is
accurate too. The second a domain goes live it gets
discovered.
conductr 8 hours ago [-]
Any thoughts on why ~30% of HTTP request are in US? I know we had first mover advantage for awhile but I'd expect this to have been diluted by larger populations by now. It doesn't appear to be AI/bot driven either.
chadgpt3 3 hours ago [-]
Network effect feedback. Cheap hosting in the US because servers are there, more servers are there because of demand for hosting. AWS is there - similar reasons. Big Tech had more time to develop there and eclipsed other countries' tech.
yacin 8 hours ago [-]
my first guess would be a decent chunk of things bot operators want to scrape are in the US. might as well have your bot nearer to the source.
arbol 8 hours ago [-]
Is it not just a case of most of their clients being US based?
dietr1ch 8 hours ago [-]
Not shocking if CF is now trying really hard to keep me out of the internet
5 hours ago [-]
EarlKing 9 hours ago [-]
If they were truly this accurate at identifying sources of bot traffic, you'd think they'd be better at blocking them without inconveniencing the rest of us.
giancarlostoro 8 hours ago [-]
Would love to see it go further back and some meaningful metric of how much is web scrapers vs bots.
giancarlostoro 9 hours ago [-]
Given how most of the internet is on mobile, I wonder how much that would skew this.
layer8 9 hours ago [-]
Only for HTML content. Total traffic would have been surprising.
0x59 8 hours ago [-]
CF posts metrics which reinforces their business... shocking
Symbiote 8 hours ago [-]
It's not Cloudflare's title, the submitted invented it.
yjftsjthsd-h 7 hours ago [-]
The submitter submitted a link to #bot-vs-human , the tile of which is
> Bot vs. Human
0x59 8 hours ago [-]
Sorry for the confusion, I was pointing out that the submitter submitted something silly and not that CF is boosting its business.
ChrisArchitect 8 hours ago [-]
On the Traffic page it is showing Bots more than Human,
but on the Bot page it's the opposite: 65.9% Human vs 34.1% Bot
I put a project online - it was online for a month, and the second I added an SSL cert it went from 0 traffic to 1000 requests/min.
I've been thinking of using wildcard certs for Caddy in regards to this.
Either way! People monitor cert registries for targets.
at the end you have blocked every network with human visitors and only datacenter IPs can access your site.
The proxies rotate IP every day, so you either have ineffective blocking or you block the whole network.
modern blocking is behaviour / heuristic based
edit: 'nikcub beat me to it by 30 seconds :)
Where I would start to worry is if there's evidence that bot access patterns are starting to become harder to distinguish from human access patterns, which would suggest that they are, in fact, mimicking or masquerading as humans. I don't care how many search bots are indexing web content, but I do worry about how many social bots are attempting to manipulate or mislead people.
I would add that AI dramatically blurs the line between legitimate and malicious, and the intent generally speaking.
In regards to social bots, there's a 2024 study of over 1 million accounts on X and over 60% were found likely to be bots. Curiously, when Musk took over Twitter, the "Blue Checkmark" became something that can be bought for several bucks a month (with crypto, even), without any sort of verification.
You should browse reddit sometime. The easy ones to spot just autocreate accounts using the autoname at signup, which is of the formfactor [word1][word2]/d{4}
Regex nazis please spare me, I am doing my bestest
The graph seems like it only goes back to April 27 and on that day it was 57% bot…
(Emphasis mine)
I realize that this is likely an inherent limitation, but there is a difference between "bot vs human traffic" and "traffic that CF thinks is bot/human". Every time CF blocks me, I assume it claims I'm a bot in this chart.
AI-driven* bot activity has increased more than tenfold however in the past 12 months so I'm confident this will grow to a very solid majority.
Do you mean 2013 or 2023?
Some of my opinion above is formed from my own experience making similar charts just because I wonder what something would look like graphed out :)
The geology of the area seems to make for good cooling and DR sturdiness. One DC is even 500 meters under rock.
https://www.datacentermap.com/gibraltar/gibraltar/
https://www.datacentermap.com/gibraltar/gibraltar/continent8...
This sorta mirrors the early-mid 2010's when people[1] were worried about how much of the internet was streaming traffic.
[1] Mostly ISP's annoyed at not being able to monetize it and folks trying to sell monetization solutions to them - https://www.sandvine.com/hubfs/Sandvine_Redesign_2019/Downlo...
The SSL cert observation in another comment here is accurate too. The second a domain goes live it gets discovered.
> Bot vs. Human
but on the Bot page it's the opposite: 65.9% Human vs 34.1% Bot
https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots?dateRange=7d
?