The AI bot takeover of the internet continues apace, and the latest data suggests the surge is being driven less by model-training scrapes and more by the growing use of AI tools as a stand-in for web search.
Tollbit, an outfit that tracks AI bot traffic, said in its latest State of the Bots report that by Q4 2025, there was roughly one AI bot visit for every 31 human visits to a site, up from just one bot visit for every 200 human visits in Q1.
That’s likely a conservative estimate too, says Tollbit, as AI bots just keep getting better at seeming like humans when they navigate a website.
“From the tests we ran … many of these web scrapers are indistinguishable from human visitors on sites,” Tollbit noted. “In light of this, the data below is conservative; it is likely worse than these numbers.”
To further drive home the fact that we’re losing the internet to AI bots, human web traffic is also on the decline, Tollbit noted in its data. From Q3 to Q4 of 2025, the company noted, human visitors to websites declined by five percent.
Hoist that RAG
It seems like just yesterday that the biggest concern about AI taking over the web had to do with firms sucking up every piece of content they could find to train their bots with. That’s still going on – as evidenced by all the copyright cases being fought in courts – but training scrapers are no longer the reason for most of the AI bot traffic.
Training scrapes actually dropped by 15 percent between Q2 and Q4 of last year, Tollbit noted. Instead of scraping to develop models, bot traffic is being dominated by retrieval augmented generation (RAG) bots, which are what companies like OpenAI, Google, and others use to extract real-time information from the web to answer queries put to ChatGPT, Gemini, and the like.
RAG bot traffic increased by 33 percent in the same period that training bot traffic declined. AI search indexers, which build indexes used by RAG bots, also saw traffic increase by 59 percent in the same period.
Unsurprisingly, the heaviest scraping activity is attributed to OpenAI. Per Tollbit, ChatGPT-User, the company’s RAG bot, averages five times as many scrapes per page as the second highest scraper, which comes from Meta.
If it’s not clear what that means, it’s that humans are abandoning the internet and letting bots pull and collate information for them at an increasing rate.
According to marketing firm Eight Oh Two, 37 percent of active AI users now start their searches in AI platforms like ChatGPT or Gemini rather than turning first to Google or other traditional search engines. Pew Research found that 62 percent of US adults use AI in some form at least several times a week, suggesting that, if it’s not gaining traction in the enterprise, consumers are at least lapping it up.
Tollbit said that B2B and professional websites, national news, and lifestyle content are the most AI-scraped sites, though the highest increase in scraping since Q2 of last year was seen in the tech and consumer electronics space, which jumped by 107 percent. The second-highest increase, B2B and professional, rose just 62 percent.
“This growth is likely to be driven by a corresponding increase in relevant prompts on consumer AI applications that stems from more users turning to these tools for information retrieval tasks,” Tollbit noted.
Publishers perish
AI users driving the RAG surge aren’t exactly checking their references. The already abysmal referral traffic from AI apps to the sites they source is also on the decline, Tollbit said, and dramatically.
From 0.8 percent in Q2 2025, clickthrough rates from AI apps fell to just 0.27 percent in Q4, a decline of nearly threefold. Tollbit noted that websites with AI licensing deals aren’t being insulated from this either, with their clickthrough rates dropping to just 1.33 percent in Q4 – a 6.5x decrease from earlier in the year.
What that means for the future of the internet, according to Tollbit cofounder and chief operating officer Olivia Joslin, is clear: The internet may soon not be a place for us meatbags.
“AI traffic will continue to surge and replace direct human visitors to sites,” Joslin told The Register in an email. “Ultimately, AI will become the primary reader of the Internet.”
Joslin further predicted that, at the rate human traffic is declining and bot traffic is increasing, the internet could become a bot-first operation in short order.
“It could be this year that we see AI visitors being the dominant visitors to publisher sites,” Joslin estimated.
Unfortunately for publishers, Joslin sees the shift from human to bot dominance online as inevitable.
“AI is terrific at answering our questions and enabling us to complete deep research; it’s inescapable,” she noted. “AI visitors read far more than human visitors; they don’t get tired, and they can do far deeper research, while we get bored after looking at the third link.”
“The odds are very much stacked against publishers,” Joslin told us.
The future might not be great for AI users, either.
Some studies suggest that AI use has a direct negative impact on critical thinking and skills. Young people are frequent users of it despite mental health warnings, and studies of students found that those relying on AI for help writing essays showed poorer knowledge retention than those doing the legwork on their own.
Warnings of an AI-fueled intellectual crisis don’t even touch on the fact that AI is yet another level of curation on top of search engine result algorithms that affect what sort of information gets delivered to users and in what format.
So here we are, yet again, with more data suggesting the current iteration of the internet is dying. This time, however, it seems we need to point the finger at the internet users who are gladly sacrificing it on the altar of convenience that is the AI chatbot. ®
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