Full Answer

The 57.5% figure covers all automated traffic — search engine crawlers, AI training bots (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Bytespider), monitoring services, security scanners, and malicious scrapers. Not all of it is harmful, but all of it generates events that your tracking stack processes as if they were human sessions. When GA4 records a page_view event from Bytespider, it counts toward your session total, affects your engagement rate calculations, and if the bot happens to trigger a purchase event through a testing or scraping path, it contaminates your conversion data.

The practical concern for store owners is not the bots themselves — it is what they do to your measurement accuracy. A store with 10,000 monthly sessions in GA4 may have only 4,000 to 5,000 human sessions. Every metric calculated against the inflated total — conversion rate, revenue per session, engagement rate — is wrong by a factor that varies daily depending on crawl activity. Server-side tracking that filters bot traffic at the event level, before it reaches GA4, is the only way to report against a clean human-only baseline (BigQuery can reveal which AI agents are visiting your store).

The bot share is also growing. Cloudflare's 2024 report put automated traffic at 37.8% of all internet requests — the jump to 57.5% in 2026 reflects the rapid expansion of AI crawlers and shopping agents. For WooCommerce stores, this trajectory means the gap between reported and actual human traffic will widen every quarter unless you actively filter at the tracking layer.