Half the Internet Isn't Human Anymore

At POSSIBLE 2026, a panel featuring leaders from OpenX, Human Security, and TriCoast Media, and hosted by Danny Wright of Portrait Media Group put a number on something the industry has been circling for a while: roughly half of all internet traffic is now synthetic. That includes LLM scrapers, AI agents acting on behalf of humans, and the usual bad bots. And each of those categories behaves differently, expects different things, and requires different treatment from brands.

Andy Goode, SVP of Strategy at OpenX, framed the broader challenge clearly: “Complexity masquerading as sophistication” is the biggest threat to programmatic right now. The infrastructure that was built to serve human audiences is now processing traffic from entities that aren’t audiences at all. Without granular visibility into what’s reaching your ads, your performance data is telling you a story that may not be true. The CMOs who get ahead of this won’t just protect their media investment. They’ll be the ones whose measurement still means something in twelve months.