The resolution of this forecast hinges on the most authoritative report available in September 2028, which will likely be the Imperva/Thales Bad Bot Report published in early 2028 covering calendar year 2027. According to this series, the human share of web traffic has been in a multi-year decline, dropping from 50.4% in 2023 imperva.com to 49% in 2024 cpl.thalesgroup.com, and reaching 47% in 2025 imperva.com. In the 2025 data, bad bots accounted for 40% of traffic and good bots 13% imperva.com. Ext
Assessed alongside forecasts for heavily targeted publisher sites , this estimate was slightly smoothed but remains centered at 42% to reflect compounding AI bot traffic.
The median estimated share of human traffic to content-heavy publisher, reference, and educational websites in September 2028 is 43%, with an interquartile range of 34% to 53% and a 10th to 90th percentile range of 25% to 60%.
Historical vendor measurements for these specific verticals showed a higher human share than the global average. Data for 2025–2026 placed verticals like Education and News between 61% and 65% human 2 sources. However, this baseline is rapidly degrading. Content-ri
Evaluated against estimates for global web traffic , the distribution remains wide to account for publishers either successfully blocking bots or being overwhelmed by AI scrapers.
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