Automation is growing eight times faster than human traffic, forcing organizations to move beyond bot mitigation toward a new trust layer that distinguishes beneficial AI agents from malicious activity
NEW YORK, NY — March 26, 2026 — HUMAN Security, Inc., the trust layer for digital customer experiences in the agentic era, today announced the findings from its 2026 State of AI Traffic & Cyberthreat Benchmark Report. This year’s report reveals that the digital landscape is undergoing a profound transformation, automated traffic is growing eight times faster than human traffic, and the makeup of that automation is shifting, with AI systems now participating in digital commerce.
In 2025, HUMAN’s Defense Platform analyzed more than one quadrillion digital interactions, revealing an internet increasingly shaped by the rapid rise of AI-driven traffic—up 187% from January to December—and a growing diversity of automation behind it. Once a niche category, AI agents are now a measurable commercial force, with activity concentrated in high-impact sectors like retail and e-commerce, streaming and media, and travel and hospitality. As these agents become more capable, they are beginning to transact on behalf of users, further accelerating their influence on digital ecosystems. At the same time, the line between benign and malicious automation continues to narrow, fundamentally shifting how we evaluate online activity—from simply asking “bot or not” to a more critical question: “trust or not.”
“As automation accelerates and begins to outpace human activity, we’re witnessing a fundamental shift in how the internet operates,” said Stu Solomon, CEO at HUMAN. “AI-driven traffic is no longer experimental—it’s becoming embedded in core digital customer experiences, particularly in industries like e-commerce, media, and travel where agentic adoption is moving fastest. As these systems evolve from browsing to transacting, they are redefining online engagement and raising the stakes for how businesses understand and manage the traffic coming to their platforms.”
Here are the key findings highlighting the rapid growth of AI-driven traffic and the increasing sophistication of automation across the digital ecosystem:
“Unquestionably trusting novel technology like agentic AI could lead to risks such as compromised credentials, data misuse, and unintended consequences when shopping,” said Lindsay Kaye, Vice President of Threat Intelligence, HUMAN Security. “Organizations need unparalleled visibility into agentic and other emerging technologies to understand the benefits and risks and make informed, case-by-case decisions.”
As 2026 progresses, the challenge for organizations is no longer just managing bot volume but distinguishing between legitimate AI commerce and sophisticated abuse. The report data suggests that while automation is growing for both good and ill, the patterns are identifiable. Success in this new era requires moving beyond static identity-based controls toward continuous behavioral validation across the entire session lifecycle to establish trust.
To read the full copy of HUMAN Security’s 2026 State of AI Traffic & Cyberthreat Benchmark Report, please visit here.