DataDome report finds malicious automated traffic growing 9x faster than human traffic and targeting deeper customer journey stages
DataDome's State of Bot & Agent Security Report 2026 reveals that malicious automated traffic grew 9x in 12 months and is increasingly targeting deeper parts of the customer journey.
Briefing
- DataDome: DataDome's State of Bot & Agent Security Report 2026 reveals that malicious automated traffic grew 9x in 12 months and is increasingly targeting deeper parts of the customer journey.
Why it matters
The 9x growth rate signals that bot operators are scaling attacks far faster than legitimate traffic grows, putting pressure on defenses that rely on volume-based heuristics. Targeting deeper into the customer journey means bots are no longer just scraping front-end content but are probing checkout flows, account management, and post-login endpoints, which raises the stakes for fraud detection and requires more granular monitoring across the full application stack.
Sources
- Primary source · DataDome · 2026-09-22 — DataDome Report: Malicious Automated Traffic Is Growing 9x Faster Than Human Traffic — and Targeting Deeper Into the Customer Journey
Watch next
Will other anti-bot vendors report similar acceleration in bot traffic targeting post-login and checkout flows in their own 2026 data?