• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, Yesterday

Automated traffic, artificial intelligence (AI)-based agents and searches are growing eight times faster than human traffic, according to Microsoft data. The company said the number of AI-driven sessions it monitored in 2025 tripled.

Supporting this growth, Microsoft announced four key updates Wednesday that support brands as the company moves more fully into AI and agentic services across its network and the web.

Marketers have felt challenged as they navigate the web because they need to build campaigns that interact with both humans and agentic agents.

Microsoft’s updates, announced ahead of Cannes Lions, are intended to combine both areas of service across the new web.

James Murray, global product storytelling lead for generative AI at Microsoft, said during an online meeting with industry experts that when agents are blocked from a website or a commerce site, it cannot discover a brand’s products, make recommendations, or create demand for the brand.

One of Cloudflare's tools shows that agentic AI bots now generate 57.4% of web requests globally, with humans accounting for just 42.6%.

The company’s CEO Matthew Prince had predicted bots would surpass humans by 2027, but it happened in June 2026.

“Welp, that happened faster than I predicted,” Prince wrote on the social media site X. “Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027, but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet's history.”

Microsoft’s Murray said about “80% of websites are blocking these agents,” which is why the company has methodically planned updates to support advertisers through this change.

The updates include an AI-native search infrastructure for agents, an AI citation reporting infrastructure; updates to its model context protocol (MCP) server to help build custom AI workflows, and support to build curated data-partner segments for programmatic buying.

Marketers building an AI agent or application can use “Web IQ,” one of the product updates and released today, to make the latest web data available to the chat agent, for example.

AI citations and content recommendations driven by web analytics will also become available in the coming weeks.

Six launch partners — Compliant, Peer39, Dstillery, Samba, Experian Audigent, and Sharethis — have begun working with Microsoft to add data for programmatic buys through Microsoft’s Media Marketplace.

Murray said brands want to add more data, including insights from third-party websites about their customers, so the company now incorporates information found by these six launch partners.