A new report by Akamai Technologies reveals that India now leads the Asia-Pacific region in AI bot activity, outpacing both Japan and China, as automated traffic continues to reshape the digital economy. According to Akamai’s State of the Internet: Digital Fraud and Abuse Report 2025, AI-driven bots have surged by an alarming 300% year-on-year, generating billions of automated requests that are distorting analytics, ad revenue, and business performance across industries.
These bots—ranging from advanced AI scrapers to fraud-driven automation tools—now make up nearly 1% of total bot traffic observed across Akamai’s global network. The report warns that such unregulated AI activity threatens to undermine traditional digital business models, particularly for publishers and e-commerce platforms that rely on authentic user engagement.
Content Scraping and AI Fraud on the Rise
The findings show that content scraping has emerged as the primary driver of AI bot traffic, as generative AI tools increasingly rely on web data for training. The publishing industry, already grappling with declining ad revenue, has been hit hardest—accounting for 63% of AI bot triggers across Akamai’s observed traffic.
Meanwhile, the commerce sector recorded over 25 billion bot requests in just two months, reflecting widespread misuse of AI for pricing manipulation, fake reviews, and promotion fraud. Healthcare followed as another vulnerable sector, with over 90% of its bot traffic linked to data scraping by AI training engines and search bots.
Akamai’s report also highlighted the emergence of malicious tools like FraudGPT, WormGPT, and return-fraud bots that enable threat actors to automate identity theft, phishing, and impersonation scams at unprecedented scale.
AI Bots Challenge Security and Trust Frameworks
Rupesh Chokshi, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Application Security at Akamai, warned that AI bots are no longer a niche cybersecurity concern but a boardroom-level business risk. “The rise of AI bots has moved from the security team’s concern to the boardroom’s business imperative,” Chokshi said. “Organizations must act now to build governance frameworks that ensure secure AI adoption, manage evolving risks, and protect digital ecosystems.”
The report recommends that organizations align their AI risk strategies with the OWASP Top 10 frameworks for web applications, APIs, and large language models (LLMs). This includes proactive monitoring of broken access controls, injection flaws, and data exposure vulnerabilities that enable AI bots to infiltrate enterprise systems.
India’s Digital Ecosystem Under Pressure
India’s rapid digital expansion—fueled by AI adoption, e-commerce growth, and increased cloud usage—has created fertile ground for both innovation and exploitation. As AI bots scrape and replicate content at scale, businesses face mounting operational costs, degraded user experiences, and unreliable analytics.
Industry analysts say this calls for a dual approach: embracing AI innovation while strengthening bot management and fraud detection systems. With India emerging as both a creator and target of AI-powered automation, balancing opportunity and oversight has become a national business imperative.
