The Information Machine

Bots have overtaken humans online, and the internet was never prepared for this.

Rohan Paul Twitter · Rohan Paul (@rohanpaul_ai) · 2026-06-05

Rohan Paul highlights new data showing bots now generate 57.4% of global HTML requests, surpassing human traffic and threatening the economic foundations of web advertising and monetization.

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Topics: bot-trafficweb-ecosystemdigital-advertisinginternet-infrastructure

Claims

  • Bots generate 57.4% of worldwide HTML requests, exceeding human traffic at 42.6%.
  • The internet was not architecturally or economically designed to handle a non-human majority of traffic.
  • Rising total traffic can coincide with falling monetizable human attention, depressing CPM, CPC, and conversion rates.
  • The shift represents a fundamental economic threat to web publishers and advertisers.

Key quotes

bots generate 57.4% of worldwide HTML requests - humans at 42.6%.
traffic can rise while monetizable human attention falls, which weakens CPM, CPC, conversion-rate