This post was created in partnership with Human Security
In the past year, the internet stopped being a human-majority place. Automated traffic grew eight times faster than human traffic in 2024, according to cybersecurity firm Human Security. Notably, Cloudflare reports that bots now account for more than half of all internet requests.ย
At Cannes Lions, four of the industryโs leading platforms gathered to work through what that actually means for marketers.
โWeโre at a unique inflection point in history where more than 50% of the traffic on the internet is machine-based,โ said Stu Solomon, CEO of Human. โThe controls, the optimization, the marketingโeverything is predicated on this notion that thereโs a human on the other side of the screen, and thatโs just not the case anymore.โ
The session, moderated by ADWEEKโs senior tech reporter Kendra Barnett, brought together leaders from Human, Reddit, Roku, and Tripadvisor to examine what a bot-majority internet means for advertisers, publishers, and platforms and whether the industry is moving fast enough to respond.
From fraud to agents
Up until recently, the ad industryโs relationship with bots was simple: bots were bad, humans were good. That binary is no longer useful, according to Solomon.
โTurns out humans can be bad and machines can be good,โ he said. โNow we get into this world of agentics, where an autonomous agent is working on behalf of a human thatโs been authorized to do something on my behalf. Is it good or bad? It kind of depends on what itโs trying to do.โ
To illustrate the gap between agenticโs capabilities and judgement, Solomon described an internal test where his team programmed an agent to purchase three birthday cakes from a bakery website. The agent navigated the site, used dropdown menus, selected the cakes, and completed the transactionโthen returned a $750 bill. โIt got the job done, but it didnโt have the human understanding of what good looks like,โ…