1,500 to 1 . . . ! AI bots turn out to be a major reason why web and data center traffic are out of control.

Photo above – a Google search for “Epstein Trump News Today” generated 93,000 links. Would a news bot try to visit them all?

I recently shopped for an Apple tablet. A birthday gift for someone. I visited Amazon, Best Buy, and some other site. Purchased from Best Buy because it was $50 less. If I had created/employed a “shopping bot” (for efficiency) to automate this task, it would have (on average) visited 5,000 sites (see link below). That's 1,500X as many sites as I personally visited. 5,000 sites to compare reviews, features, prices, seller reputation, warranties, shipping costs, returns . . . you name it.

If you want to know why data center construction is out of control – and along with it electricity and water demand – I present the humble shopping bot as exhibit 1. As well as bots created to monitor crypto prices, overwhelm our inboxes with spam, and give updates on the latest French Open tennis results. And in the case of Amazon, its bots continue to bombard me with every possible tablet deal, for weeks and weeks, after my one and only inquiry.

The proud recipient of the birthday tablet has (not ironically) immediately created several AI agentic bots. She is very concerned about crypto price movements. Any news which links Trump to Epstein. Overthrow of the Trump administration because of pedophilia. The never ending release of UFO documents. Avi Loeb’s latest discovery of aliens who disguise their spacecraft as asteroids. On and on. Do I need to point out that this young lady has less than $20 invested in bitcoin? That she personally sees UFOs? That many low flying aircraft here in Florida are likely “up to no good”?

The birthday girl with this new tablet scores “above average” for IQ. How else could she so quickly launch her own agentic bots? Thankfully her obsessions don’t spill into the violent or dangerous realm. But they crowd out the sort of things which others might put at the top of the list: a job, food, clothing, and shelter. She needs bots to keep track of all her fringe interests. Simply being told that Bitcoin is down 24.34% over the past month requires multiple bot-checks a day.

Back to web traffic. The link says that more than half of all web traffic is now generated by AI agentic bots. But that’s only the bots which properly identify themselves. There are a bunch of AI bots – nobody knows how many – which illegally masquerade as humans. They are constantly on the prowl for news articles, photographs etc. which they can violate trademarks on, and regurgitate as their own for profit. How do you think 6 million online novels – in English alone – were published last year? Human internet traffic could be seriously overstated because of AI impersonating humans, for profit.

Utah is building a data center which will use more electricity than the rest of the entire state. It will release as much heat every day as the equivalent of multiple Hiroshima nukes. This data center is made possible (in part) because of our never-ending obsession with shopping, crypto, UFOs, and Epstein.

I’m just sayin’ . . .


Bot web traffic has overtaken human web traffic, data shows