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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. 

At Cannes Lions, four of the industry’s leading platforms gathered to work through what that actually means for marketers.

“We’re at a unique inflection point in history where more than 50% of the traffic on the internet is machine-based,” said Stu Solomon, CEO of Human. “The controls, the optimization, the marketing—everything is predicated on this notion that there’s a human on the other side of the screen, and that’s just not the case anymore.”

The session, moderated by ADWEEK’s 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 industry’s relationship with bots was simple: bots were bad, humans were good. That binary is no longer useful, according to Solomon.

“Turns out humans can be bad and machines can be good,” he said. “Now we get into this world of agentics, where an autonomous agent is working on behalf of a human that’s been authorized to do something on my behalf. Is it good or bad? It kind of depends on what it’s trying to do.”

To illustrate the gap between agentic’s 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 transaction—then returned a $750 bill. “It got the job done, but it didn’t have the human understanding of what good looks like,”…