Is the 'dead internet theory' basically just true now

[StarfieldPilgrim]

Started as a fringe forum conspiracy back in 2021, the idea that most of the internet had quietly become bots and AI content talking to itself with real people pushed to the margins. The Imperva Bad Bot Report for 2026 put automated traffic at over 53 percent of the entire global web in 2025, up from 51 percent the year before, and that's the second year running that bots have technically outnumbered humans online. Curious whether people here think this genuinely changes how the internet feels day to day, or whether it's mostly background noise, search engine crawlers and scrapers, that most of us never actually encounter directly.

[Grace]

The bot traffic number always gets quoted without the context that a huge chunk of it is legitimate stuff, search engine crawlers, uptime monitors, API integrations, the genuinely malicious slice is a smaller number buried inside that headline figure