Automated Traffic Surges Past Human Activity, Redefining Digital Commerce
Event summary
- HUMAN Security’s 2026 report reveals automated traffic grew 23.51% YoY in 2025, outpacing human traffic growth of 3.10%.
- AI-driven traffic surged 187% from January to December 2025, with 95% concentrated in retail, media, and travel sectors.
- Agentic AI traffic grew 7,851% YoY, with increasing activity in user accounts and checkout processes.
- Post-login account compromise attacks quadrupled since 2024, averaging over 400,000 attempts per customer.
The big picture
HUMAN Security’s report signals a fundamental shift in digital ecosystems, where AI agents are transitioning from browsing to transacting. This transformation raises the stakes for businesses to evolve beyond binary bot detection toward nuanced trust assessment. The rapid adoption of agentic solutions in high-impact sectors like e-commerce and media underscores both the commercial potential and security challenges of this new internet era.
What we're watching
- Trust Validation
- How businesses adapt to continuous behavioral validation across session lifecycles to distinguish legitimate AI commerce from abuse.
- Industry Targeting
- Whether retail and e-commerce can mitigate their disproportionate exposure to scraping, carding, and ATO attacks.
- AI Diversification
- The pace at which AI-driven automation diversifies beyond training crawlers into more sophisticated commercial applications.
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