AI agent web traffic doubles in South Korea in a year

As AI adoption rises in South Korea, web traffic generated by automated systems such as AI agents — rather than human users — has surged sharply.

The trend points to a broader shift in who, or what, is driving internet activity, as the spread of AI-powered search moves the role of web browsing from people to AI agents.

An analysis of domestic HTTP request traffic from global internet infrastructure company Cloudflare shows that the bot traffic index hit its highest point in a year — registering at 100% — on June 8. HTTP requests refer to the process by which a web browser requests data to perform tasks such as loading a webpage.

On July 1 last year, the bot traffic index stood at just 48.6% of that peak level. It surged past 80% in December before reaching its year-high on June 8, roughly doubling in the span of a year.

Bot traffic captures the total volume of HTTP requests made by automated systems — including AI agents and crawlers — rather than by human users. Within that category, AI agent traffic refers specifically to the traffic generated when AI chatbots such as ChatGPT browse the internet to answer user queries.

The IT industry attributes the growth in AI agent traffic to the rising use of AI-powered search as AI adoption spreads across South Korea, with automated systems accounting for a growing share of all internet activity.

Unlike in the past, when people typed keywords into a search bar and visited individual webpages themselves, automated systems such as AI agents and crawlers now handle a far greater share of web requests. The reason is scale: while a person shopping for shoes might browse five to 10 webpages over 10 minutes, an AI agent performing the same task can query thousands of pages.

Roughly half of the South Korean population already uses AI services such as ChatGPT. According to market research firm WiseApp·Retail, ChatGPT's monthly active users in South Korea reached 23.45 million in April. Google Gemini followed with 8.45 million users, and Claude with 2.41 million.

Naver and Kakao, which together dominate South Korea's portal market, have both moved to expand their AI agent services in earnest this year. Naver launched "AI Tab," a generative AI-based conversational search service, on June 26. The service offers chatbot-style conversational search similar to ChatGPT while also delivering an agent experience that connects to the Naver ecosystem to carry out real-world actions.

Kakao is expanding AI agent capabilities centered on its KakaoTalk messaging app. Through services including "Kanana in KakaoTalk," "ChatGPT for Kakao" and "ChatGPT Chatbot," the company aims to enable the app to understand conversational context and handle everything from recommendations to reservations and payments — all within KakaoTalk — by linking to external partner services.

The trend is not limited to South Korea. Globally, AI agents surpassed humans as the primary drivers of internet search traffic for the first time in history earlier this month.

On June 4, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said the proliferation of AI agents had produced a phenomenon in which bots account for the majority of webpage requests worldwide. Figures he released showed bots made up 57.4 percent of all web traffic, while traffic from human users accounted for just 42.6 percent.

"For the first time in internet history, bot traffic has overtaken human traffic," Prince said. "We had expected this to happen around late 2027, but AI agent traffic grew so fast that it arrived much sooner than anticipated."