It’s been a week for in-person conversations, maybe because the sun came out in New York City. I was down on Wall Street talking to a demand gen vendor. I was in midtown to learn about technology for identifying fake goods (more to come on that), and then in midtown again to talk about the CMA’s latest bad news for Google.
I heard a lot of interesting things. One that stuck with me (and has since been confirmed by two sources) is that something like 48% of web traffic is bot traffic — and I don’t just mean on X. Now, maybe everyone knew that except me, but I was surprised. Not that it’s all malicious, of course. Search bots are crawling everywhere, there are the bots scraping content to train LLMs, bots trying to identify ad fraud as well as bots committing it.
Suddenly, the internet doesn’t feel like a very human place.
Kim Davis,
Editor at large
