Companies are increasingly confronting a new challenge: automated AI agents now account for a substantial share of web traffic. According to a recent analysis by Czech hosting provider vshosting, in some websites nearly half of all traffic is generated by these automated systems, creating technological, business and financial risks.
What AI agents do and why they matter
Modern AI-powered systems — including solutions from OpenAI, Google and Perplexity AI — can launch dozens of parallel web queries to answer a single question. Where a human user typically visits a few subpages on an online store or corporate site, an AI agent can scan multiple product categories, data sources or API endpoints within seconds.
When such behavior is repeated thousands of times concurrently, server load can rise sharply. Common consequences include slower response times and, in extreme cases, threats to the availability of online services.
Who is most affected?
vshosting notes that e-commerce players, financial services, media providers and SaaS companies are particularly vulnerable — in short, organizations that rely heavily on digital channels for operations and revenue. Many businesses experience the problem indirectly through rising infrastructure costs, sluggish systems or deteriorating user experience.
Damir Špoljarič, co-founder and CEO of vshosting, said: “AI agents are fundamentally reshaping the structure of web traffic. For companies today, the question is not only whether a given traffic is malicious, but also whether it creates real business value or simply consumes infrastructure resources. These automated systems can generate very large numbers of requests in a short time, which can affect performance, availability and ultimately business results.”
How companies can respond
As a countermeasure, vshosting developed the Web Security Pack, a layered web-security solution that protects against DDoS attacks, malicious bots and automated data-scraping systems. The managed service combines DDoS protection and bot mitigation functions in one package and operates at both the infrastructure and proxy layers, typically without requiring changes to websites or applications.
According to vshosting’s experience, their solution filters out on average 54 percent of incoming traffic before it reaches client systems, substantially reducing the load on servers, applications, APIs and back-end systems and contributing to more stable operation and better performance.
Looking ahead
The company’s analysis expects the number and activity of autonomous AI agents to continue growing in the coming years. As that happens, effectively managing automated traffic will become an increasingly important factor for corporate competitiveness, while ensuring real users continue to receive fast and uninterrupted service.
In summary, vshosting’s findings underscore that businesses need planned strategies and appropriate technical protections to prevent rising AI-agent traffic from degrading service availability and business performance.
