AI-related bot traffic now makes up 28% of total bot visits across more than 5,000 websites, according to data from Known Agents’ Agentic Web Index. This marks an 11% increase compared to the previous 90 days, highlighting the growing presence of AI agents, crawlers, and scrapers on the internet as of August 2026.
The Agentic Web Index tracks key ecosystem metrics using Agent Analytics and AI Chat Referral Tracking tools. It monitors bot versus human traffic, showing that bots account for 35% of total visits, a 2% decrease from the prior quarter. Meanwhile, AI chat referrals—human visits originating from AI chat—make up 0.1% of total human website visits, down 9% in the same period, per knownagents.com.
This shift reflects the internet’s evolution from a human-centric environment to one increasingly accessed and navigated by machines. The rise in AI-related bot activity underscores the expanding role of automated agents in information discovery and usage online. The data also reveals that robots.txt files remain highly effective, with a 98% compliance rate, helping websites manage bot traffic.
The Agentic Web Index’s findings provide a detailed snapshot of AI’s growing footprint on the web, based on analysis of over 5,000 sites. The next quarterly update will reveal whether these trends in AI bot traffic and human referrals continue to accelerate or stabilize.