Humans v bots: People account for under 40% of web traffic

Chances are if you’re reading this article, you’re not human – or so new research from Incapsula and Statista suggests.

According to the study – which is based on 1.45 billion visits on 20,000 websites from 249 countries – human beings account for less than 40% of global web traffic, meaning that the remaining 60% is automated.

Roughly half of all automated traffic comes from so-called ‘good bots’ that search engines such as Google use to index a website’s content; however that means that the other half is made up of malicious traffic, caused by ‘content scrapers’, spam bots and other programs that mean harm.

Of the malicious traffic, content scrapers – which are spam websites that copy all of their content from other websites – account for 5%, followed by hacking tools (4.5%) and spam bots (0.5%). The remaining 20.5% of bad non-human traffic is not identified.

The impact for publishers and advertisers is obvious; what if humans are not actually engaging with online content?

Last October, ABC UK re-launched its Spiders & Robots service in an effort to reduce inflated ad impressions and site traffic counts.

The service is expected to be a key step to prevent non-human traffic being counted in web analytics and will provide a more “transparent and accurate measurement” for ad impressions and site traffic claims.

Online video giant YouTube has also taken steps to crack down on fraudulent views with the periodical auditing of videos.