The global digital landscape is undergoing an accelerated transformation with the advancement of artificial intelligence bots. Tools like OpenClaw, formerly known as Moltbot and Clawdbot, are leading a trend that redefines how the web works.The prominence of these automated assistants signals the beginning of an era in which traffic generated by bots could surpass that of human users on many sites.
A recent report by infrastructure company Akamai and shared with WIRED, along with data from TollBit, reveals that AI bots already represent a significant portion of online activity.The study reflects a technological race in which bots perfect their techniques to circumvent the defenses implemented by website administrators, designed to limit their access.
In the last quarter of 2025, TollBit recorded that one in every 50 visits to its clients’ websites corresponded to an AI bot focused on content scraping, a figure that in the first months of the year was one in every 200.
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Today’s bots develop strategies that allow them to camouflage their activity, simulating human behavior or modifying their requests to evade detection mechanisms.Some agents are capable of allowing their traffic to go unnoticed, making it difficult to identify and regulate its presence.
The report warns that the behavior of these bots, in many cases, is almost indistinguishable from the traffic generated by real people.
Companies responsible for website maintenance use specialized tools to control bot access and, in some cases, seek to monetize scraping activity by charging fees to AI agents.This new model of programmatic value exchange between machines could modify the digital economy and affect all actors that depend on human trafficking, from publishers to e-commerce.
Some of the main companies dedicated to data scraping defend the legitimacy of their operations.Bright Data maintains that its bots do not access private or authentication-protected information.ScrapingBee argues that automated access to public pages is a principle inherent to the open structure of the Internet.For its part, Oxylabs emphasizes that it requires its clients to respect access limits and that there are legitimate uses of these practices, such as cybersecurity or investigative journalism.
However, companies recognize that anti-bot measures applied by many websites do not always distinguish between malicious traffic and automated access for legitimate purposes.This lack of differentiation can affect initiatives with legitimate objectives and poses additional challenges for web management.
The increase in competition in the sector has led to the emergence of more than 40 companies that offer scraping services for training AI systems or other purposes.Many companies are now exploring strategies such as generative engine optimization (GEO), which involves adapting content to facilitate its access and visibility in search engines and AI tools, rather than hindering them.
The advancement of AI bots and the sophistication of their access techniques suggest that automated traffic will continue to increase during 2026.
The web could experience a structural change, in which interaction between machines and programmatic content management become central elements.For website managers, the challenge will be to balance protecting their digital assets with adapting to an environment in which autonomous bots play an increasingly relevant role.
The evolution of this dynamic, driven by tools such as OpenClaw and the growing demand for data for intelligent systems, outlines a scenario in which collaboration and conflict between humans and bots will define the functionality and business model of the web of the future.
