Akamai Technologies released its State of the Internet report and said on the 5th that AI bot traffic across the web has surged more than 300% over the past year.
According to Akamai, AI bots are used for large-scale content scraping and impersonation and phishing attacks, distorting digital operations and analytics data. AI bots account for only about 1% of total bot traffic, but they generate billions of requests and pose a real threat to web-based business models, it said.
In particular, the publishing industry has suffered the greatest damage. Sixty-three percent of all AI bot triggers occurred in attacks targeting media and content corporations. With unauthorized data collection for AI model training on the rise, the analysis said this is leading to worsening advertising revenue and confusion in traffic analytics. The commerce industry was also hit hard, with more than 2.5 billion AI bot requests detected over two months. In healthcare, scraping-centered AI bot activity accounted for more than 90%.
Akamai warned that as AI-based social engineering attacks and technologies that generate forged documents and images advance, sophisticated fraud is becoming easier. Useful bots such as search engine crawlers do exist, but because malicious bots cause expense increases and performance degradation, it said corporations need to strengthen their response systems.
The report recommends that corporations build security capabilities aligned with three OWASP top 10 frameworks for web applications, application programming interfaces (API), and large language models (LLM) to respond to these threats. The frameworks help security teams map known vulnerabilities such as broken access control, injection flaws, and data exposure to a corporation's fraud risk tolerance and set defense priorities more effectively.
Rupesh Chokshi, senior vice president and general manager of application security at Akamai, said, "The AI bot problem has expanded beyond security teams into a matter of corporate survival strategy," and added, "The safe adoption of AI and the establishment of risk management frameworks are urgent."
Meanwhile, Akamai published its 11th SOTI report this year, based on infrastructure that handles more than one-third of the world's web traffic.