Over 40 percent of web traffic is fake

As anyone who operates a website knows, a lot of the traffic you receive is non-human. Your website continuously gets crawled by search engines, but then you also have a large portion of unwanted traffic, consisting of all sorts of bots, trying to perform various nefarious tasks.

So how much of the web traffic is real, and how much is fake? A new article by at NY Mag points out studies generally suggest that less than 60 percent of web traffic is real. Furthermore, it can be questioned how much of the "human" traffic is real, which poses interesting questions on how traffic should really be measured. Check the full piece for more info.

How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”