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,” Solomon said. “I was regretting every bite.”
Trust as infrastructure
For platforms whose value proposition rests on authentic community, the stakes are particularly high. For example, Reddit has built multiple layers of defense designed to verify that the people engaging on its platform are who they claim to be.
“Users come to Reddit every day because they want to be part of the community,” said Roelof van Zwol, evp of ads monetization, data science and machine learning at Reddit. “They choose to not truly reveal their entire identity, but it gives them a level of anonymity that allows us to have real conversations about real problems. That integrity and real authentic conversation is crucial.”
Van Zwol outlined Reddit’s emerging approach to agentic traffic. Rather than blocking agentic traffic outright, the platform is focused on identification and containment, aimed at ensuring agents make themselves known and operate within defined limits. “We do want to make sure that when there are agents, we limit what they can do, or at least that they make themselves known,” he said.
