Bot Traffic Now Exceeds 50% of Web Requests, Forcing Marketers to Rethink Retargeting

Automated traffic—from AI agents, scrapers, and traditional bots—now accounts for more than half of all web requests, according to Cloudflare data. While some brands see AI-driven visits as a sales opportunity, many marketers are confronting a harder reality: inflated metrics, wasted ad spend, and the collapse of retargeting strategies that once formed the backbone of digital campaigns.

The shift is forcing advertisers to fundamentally reconsider where and how they deploy media budgets.

The retargeting crisis

For e-commerce advertisers, the problem has become acute. David Dweck, president at media agency GoFish, said the agency's e-commerce clients have seen bot traffic increase 80% year-over-year on average. That surge has poisoned retargeting campaigns, which rely on tracking user behavior to serve follow-up ads.

"Those actions got muddied, or poisoned, with a lot of bot traffic," Dweck explained. The result: cost-per-acquisition spikes and degraded performance starting in Q4 of last year.

The issue is compounded by increasingly sophisticated AI agents that can mimic human behavior—adding items to shopping carts or signing up for newsletters—in ways that evade traditional bot filters designed to catch simple page visits.

In response, some GoFish clients tightened retargeting parameters, which increased average CPMs by 20%. Others abandoned the tactic entirely, shifting budgets to social platforms like Meta, Google, and Amazon. "Since 2023, we've seen a big shift out of programmatic and back into places where people are more comfortable," Dweck said.

Nola Ladd, brand media supervisor at Collective Measures, said bot traffic provided "the final nail in the coffin" for retargeting for one affected client, which redirected spend toward retail media networks and social platforms.

The upside for some brands

Not every marketer views the bot surge as a threat. Chad Keller, co-founder of direct-to-consumer pillow brand Mellow Sleep, said AI assistants are already sending traffic that "converts several times better than our site average."

British retailer John Lewis has seen AI-driven searches rise from 0.3% to 2.5% of all web visits in a year, according to Reuters, and is actively working to attract more AI agent traffic to boost e-commerce sales.

The divergence reflects a fundamental split: brands optimized for discovery welcome AI agents as a new customer acquisition channel, while performance marketers relying on behavioral targeting are watching their attribution models crumble.

Why it matters

The bot traffic problem isn't just inflating vanity metrics—it's breaking the measurement and optimization systems that underpin billions in digital ad spend. When bots poison lookalike audiences, exhaust frequency caps, and trigger false conversion signals, marketers lose the ability to distinguish effective campaigns from wasteful ones. The exodus from programmatic retargeting toward first-party data environments and walled gardens represents a structural shift in how digital advertising operates, with lasting implications for publishers, ad tech vendors, and attribution platforms.

The path forward

Agency executives are advising clients to focus on higher-intent signals and become more selective about which user behaviors warrant marketing investment. Mallory Beck, vice president of client services at Lighthouse Creative, said the solution is "being more rigorous about what we consider a meaningful signal."

Megan Herling, executive director of media at LERMA/, noted that bots are only part of the problem—privacy updates and data opt-outs have also reduced retargeting scale. Her agency's clients have cut back on the tactic in recent years as performance declined.

Whether filtering technology can keep pace with increasingly sophisticated AI agents remains an open question. For now, marketers are voting with their budgets, moving spend toward environments where first-party data and platform controls offer more certainty about who—or what—they're reaching.

These details were first reported by Digiday.