Even when explicitly warned that synthetic bots are common, 33% of study participants still shared sensitive information.

Bots account for 29% of all web traffic, with approximately 25% of this traffic classified as unwanted.

4% of wanted bot requests were blocked, reflecting concerns about data usage and revenue impact.

Bot requests increased by 2% in Q3 2025 compared to the prior quarter, representing billions of requests.

In Q3 2025, commerce received 88% of crawler traffic, while the Public Sector received 96%, and Education had the highest fetcher volume at 77%

89% of headless bot traffic (which mimic human behavior at machine speed) in Q3 targeted transaction-heavy industries like Financial Services and Commerce.

90% of consumers say it is important to verify that they are buying from a real person.

44% of consumers admit to feeling annoyed or angry after losing out to bots during online sales.

Over a third of consumers experience genuine stress while shopping online.

75% of consumers expect the issue with bots to worsen this year.

66% of consumers regularly find themselves competing with bots for limited products during the holiday shopping season.

57% of consumers say bots have been a major problem for online shoppers for the last six years.

18% of consumers feel 'very confident' in distinguishing real products from fakes.

64% of consumers feel that automated programs are stealing the joy of shopping altogether.

53% of consumers say they are likely to brave in-store crowds this year due to frustration with bots.

24% of manipulation concerns in the gig economy by 2026 will be related to bots and script automation.

In 2025, anti-fingerprinting bots were only blocked by ~7% of websites.

In North America and Europe, over 60% of websites lack any bot protection.

Only 2% of domains with over 30M monthly visits were fully protected against bots.

Travel & Hospitality, Gambling, and Real Estate led the way with the highest combined rates of full and partial protection against bots.