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Virtual viral OpenClaw Assistant—formerly known as multipotand before that Clawdbot — is a code for A broader revolution is underway which could radically change how the Internet works. Instead of being a place primarily inhabited by humans, it may very soon dominate the web Autonomous artificial intelligence robots.
A New report Measuring bot activity on the web, as well as related data shared with WIRED by internet infrastructure company Akamai, shows that AI bots already account for a significant share of web traffic. The findings also highlight the increasingly sophisticated arms race unfolding as bots use clever tactics to bypass the defenses of websites they aim to keep out.
“The majority of the Internet will be automated traffic in the future,” says Toshit Pangrahi, co-founder and CEO of TollBit, a company that tracks web scraping activity and published the new report. “It’s not just a copyright issue, there’s a new visitor coming online.”
Most large websites try to limit the content that content bots can scrape and feed to AI systems Training purposes. (WIRED’s parent company, Condé Nast, as well as other publishers, is currently suing several AI companies over alleged copyright infringement related to AI training.)
But another type of AI-related website scraping is on the rise as well. Many chatbots and other AI tools can now do this Retrieve information in real time from the web and use them to increase and improve their output. This may include updated product prices, movie theater schedules, or summaries of the latest news.
According to Akamai data, training-related bot traffic has been steadily rising since last July. Meanwhile, global activity from bots fetching web content for AI clients is also on the rise.
“AI is changing the web as we know it,” Robert Plomovi, chief technology officer at Akamai, tells WIRED. “The ensuing arms race will determine the future look, feel, and function of the web, as well as the fundamentals of doing business.”
In Q4 2025, TollBit estimates that an average of 1 in 50 visits to its customers’ websites were from AI bots. In the first three months of 2025, that number was just one in every 200 applications. The company says that in the fourth quarter, more than 13 percent of bot requests exceeded the robots.txt file, which is the file that… Some sites Used to indicate pages that bots are supposed to avoid. TollBit says the share of AI bots ignoring robots.txt increased 400 percent from Q2 to Q4 last year.
TollBit also reported a 336 percent increase in the number of websites that attempted to block AI bots over the past year. Extraction techniques are becoming more sophisticated as sites try to assert control over how bots access their content, Pangrahi says. Some bots disguise themselves by making their traffic appear to be coming from a regular web browser or sending requests designed to mimic how humans typically interact with websites. The TollBit study notes that the behavior of some AI agents is now indistinguishable from human web traffic.
Tolbit Markets tools Website owners can use it to charge AI scrapers for access to their content. other companies, Including Cloudflare, displays Similar tools. “Anyone who relies on human web traffic — starting with publishers, but basically everyone — will be affected,” Pangrahi says. “There has to be a faster way to exchange value between machine and machine.”