RAG bots could overtake human visitors on publisher sites this year, trackers tell us

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 ...