New Delhi, Nov 5 : India leads the Asia-Pacific region in AI bot activity, and a 300 per cent increase in automated traffic globally is witnessed over the past year, a report said on Wednesday.

AI bots generated 3.2 billion triggers in India, positioning the country as the most targeted in the APAC region, followed by Japan and China, said the report from cybersecurity and cloud computing company, Akamai Technologies.

The report revealed an alarming spike in automated traffic driven largely by AI-powered bots targeting websites across all industries.

These bots generate billions of requests, significantly distorting digital operations and analytics, and make up nearly 1 per cent of total bot traffic on Akamai's platform.

The spike is primarily caused by content scraping, which undermines traditional web-based business models, publisher analytics, and ad revenue.

As bot traffic grows, publishers and other content-driven businesses are seeing corrupted analytics and collapsing ad revenues through bots extracting value without giving any in return.

The report also revealed that the rapid growth of AI-enabled tools has made it easier than ever for both experienced threat professionals and new malicious actors to launch impersonation attacks, conduct social engineering, distribute phishing campaigns, and commit identity fraud using AI-generated fake documents and images.

In addition, malicious bots such as FraudGPT, WormGPT, ad fraud bots, and return fraud bots are driving up costs, degrading site performance, and skewing key metrics.

Further, the global report stated that the commerce industry leads in AI bot activity, registering more than 25 billion bot requests over a two-month observation period.

But publishing faced the largest impact in the digital media industry, representing 63 per cent of AI bot triggers.

In the healthcare sector, more than 90 per cent of AI bot triggers stem from scraping, largely by search and training bots, the report said.

/IANS