80% of online ad budgets being 'wasted on bot traffic'

Online advertisers are being warned that bots are slowly taking over the Internet, and now account for 80% of all web traffic, meaning that of the $298.4bn businesses spent on digital ads in the past year, $238.72bn was wasted on bot traffic, not real customers.

That is the stark conclusion of a new analysis by DesignRush, which maintains that only one in five website visitors is a human.

While human versus bot traffic proportions vary by site and industry, the findings are a strong indicator of current trends, with OpenAI ChatGPT bots now making up 13% of total web traffic, up from 0% in 2023.

Meanwhile, Googlebot Search traffic has dropped to just 8%, signalling a shift away from traditional search indexing toward AI-driven data collection.

However, bots are no longer just search engines crawling websites for ranking purposes. They are now AI models, marketing tools, and data harvesters – automatically scraping content for training, analysis, and competitor insights.

The more businesses invest in high-quality content, the more AI models are being fed for free, potentially powering the very tools that compete against them. And, without better bot management, companies will continue to pay for digital foot traffic that brings no revenue.

The report outlines four immediate actions every business owner should take to rethink their digital strategy to avoid wasting resources.

Audit Web Traffic – Identify how much of your site traffic is real vs. bot-generated and analyse its impact on costs, engagement, and conversions.
Reevaluate Ad Targeting – If bots are consuming digital ads, businesses must adjust their PPC campaigns to ensure better ROI.
Redefine SEO Strategy – If AI models are pulling data instead of humans clicking search results, companies may need a new approach to online visibility.
Invest in Bot Mitigation – Businesses must limit bot activity that doesn’t serve their interests by using rate-limiting and filtering tools to reduce non-essential AI traffic.

The report concludes: “With bots now making up the vast majority of web traffic, companies can no longer operate under the assumption that their digital audience is human.”