AI Agents Now Drive Nearly Half of Web Traffic, Straining Business Infrastructure

AI-powered agents and automated systems now account for nearly half of all incoming web traffic in some deployments, according to traffic analysis by web hosting firm vshosting. Unlike traditional malicious bots, these agents mimic legitimate user behavior by browsing pages, querying APIs, and retrieving data on behalf of human users, making them harder to detect and filter. The scale is significant: a single AI agent can generate hundreds of requests per second, compared to the handful of page views a typical human visitor produces. This surge in non-human traffic inflates infrastructure costs, raises server utilization, and degrades performance for genuine users — with many businesses first noticing the problem through rising cloud bills rather than security alerts. A vshosting-protected deployment processed over 96 million requests in a short period, with more than 21 million blocked as unwanted, highlighting how much compute capacity organizations waste serving low-value automated traffic.