“The web is written by AI for AI”

From an opinion piece by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Bots now account for roughly 57-58 percent of HTTP requests for HTML content, compared with about 42-43 percent from humans. Meanwhile, Imperva’s Bad Bot Report based on 2025 data put bots at about 53 percent of measured web traffic for the second year in a row, with humans at 47 percent. […] According to Pangram, an AI detection company, on websites such as LinkedIn, Medium, Twitter, and Reddit, “about one in four long-form items were fully AI-generated.”

The author uses Perplexity as his search engine not because it’s more accurate than other AI LLMs; “it’s that it shows me its sources. I can see if what it just turned up is the real thing or just BS. Guess what? It’s often crap.”

I’m not certain the other LLMs do not show sources. I think they tend to hedge on that score. But if half of the web is AI slop, I’m not sure it makes much difference.