Sixty-one percent of all website traffic is now non-human, while a mere 38.5 percent represents humans clicking things, according to a new report from security content delivery network Incapsula,. This is a 10 percent increase in non-humanness just since a similar study in March.

Of course, there are bots and there are bots. Thirty-one percent are search engines and what Incapsula describes as “other good bots.” That proportion is increasing more than any other bot segments, which might be a good thing if we have to choose a side.

A large portion of the bot boom comes from search engine agents and SEO services, up 13 percent this year in a trend that we expect to increase as Google, Bing and others attempt to understand everything about everything.

Other segments in the bot study: Five percent are scrapers, 4.5 percent hacking tools, 0.5 percent other spammers, and then there’s “other impersonators,” representing 20.5 percent. Scrapers are also bad guys, conducting content theft, reverse engineering of pricing and email address captures for spamming. Impersonators include distributed denial of service attacks and marketing intelligence gathering.

Fortunately, spam bots have decreased slightly, which Incapsula attributes to Google’s campaign against link and comment spamming.

But watch out for the impersonators, a fast-growing part of this menagerie that is pretending to be search engine minions or other agents in order to sneak past site defenses.

If this rate of increase for non-human surfers continues, the phrase Internet of Things may soon more appropriately describe who really rules this realm.

Via Venture Beat