Between September 6 and November 8, 2026, griddo.io served 143,567 pages. 11.3% of them, 16,202, went to declared AI bots: the ones from OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, ByteDance, Meta and similar. It’s a meaningful share of a website’s visits, and the trend is for it to grow.

It’s the data of a single website, ours, measured with a method we explain below and with limits worth reading before drawing conclusions. If you run technology for a university, it works as a benchmark against what you’d see in your own logs.

Why the global 50% isn’t the AI figure

This year’s headline is that half of the internet is no longer human. Cloudflare says agent traffic has crossed 50% of internet traffic for the first time, which it already labels “non-human,” without defining what counts as such. Imperva puts automated traffic at over 53% of web traffic in 2025, up from 51% the year before. Fastly talks about machine-to-machine traffic close to half of all requests, and that bucket includes crawlers, bots, agents and API-driven systems.

None of those figures tell you how much of that traffic is AI. When Cloudflare measures only HTML requests, AI bot traffic averaged 4.2% in 2025, with a low of 2.4% in early April and a high of 6.4% in late June. As of December 2, 2025, humans generated 47% of those requests and non-AI bots, 44%. Non-human traffic is a broad bucket, and AI bots are only one part of it.

What our logs show

We read griddo.io’s CloudFront logs from September 6 to November 8, 2026 (64 days, 143,567 pages served):

“Declared bot” includes tools that aren’t AI. That’s why the figure that matters for this article is the third one, and the first serves as context. On top of that, 63,738 of the 143,567 pages fall into a “rest” bucket we couldn’t classify.

The full method, with the User-Agent list and the limitations, is in the methodology annex.

How it’s growing

Nine weeks of logs don’t tell you where this is headed. Other sources do point in a direction. From January to May 2026, AI requests on Fastly’s network grew roughly 30%, about 6.5 times faster than human traffic over the same period. In May 2026, those AI bot requests were 85% crawlers and 15% “fetchers” — agents acting on a user’s request.

What decision comes next

The usual reaction to these numbers is to block the bots. Before doing that, it’s worth looking at the logs: which bots come in, what they request, and which ones you actually want to let through.

The alternative we advocate at Griddo is a static website distributed through a CDN and managed at the edge. We cover the attack surface of this approach in how headless architecture eliminates attack classes, and platform dependency in the vendor lock-in myth. The next piece in this series looks at what to do with each type of bot.

Next step

Look at your own logs with our annex’s method and compare them with what you see here. If you want to follow this series, subscribe to Beyond The Grid.