AI bots overrun India, crush web business and ads
A cybersecurity firm has reported that India experiences the highest volume of artificial intelligence bot activity across the Asia-Pacific region, with automated web traffic surging by 300 percent worldwide during the previous year. Akamai Technologies found that AI bots produced 3.2 billion triggers within India, surpassing both Japan and China in the regional rankings. These automated programs account for nearly 1 percent of all bot traffic on the company’s platform and generate billions of requests that distort digital operations and analytical data.
Content scraping drives most of this activity, damaging traditional online business models while corrupting publisher analytics and diminishing advertising revenue. The retail sector experienced the greatest volume of AI bot requests globally, recording more than 25 billion over a two-month study period. However, publishers within the digital media space faced the most severe consequences, with 63 percent of AI bot triggers affecting their operations. Healthcare organizations saw more than 90 percent of their AI bot triggers coming from scraping activities by search and training bots.
The widespread availability of AI tools has enabled both seasoned cybercriminals and newcomers to execute impersonation schemes, social engineering tactics, phishing operations, and identity theft through artificially generated documents and images.
