61.5% of Web Traffic Is Not Human

Alexis Madrigal | Nextgov | December 12, 2013

It happened last year for the first time: Bot traffic eclipsed human traffic, according to the bot-trackers at Incapsula.

This year, Incapsula says 61.5 percent of traffic on the Web is non-human.

Now, you might think this portends the arrival of "The Internet of Things"—that ever-promised network that will connect your fridge and car to your smartphone. But it does not.

This non-human traffic is search bots, scrapers, hacking tools, and other human impersonators, little pieces of code skittering across the web. You might describe this phenomenon as The Internet of Thingies.

Because bots are not difficult to build. In fact, it's so simple that a journalist (who has not learned to code) can do it.