AI tools and agents get work done at a remarkable speed. I grew up with hardcore coding and slow development cycles, when applications took months to build, test and release, so the change still amazes me.
Recently I asked Claude a simple question:
Is there more bot traffic on the internet today than human traffic?
The short answer is yes. The two most-cited studies both show bots now make up slightly more web traffic than people. (Both count visits to websites, not all internet activity.)
- Imperva: Bots made up 51% of web traffic in 2024, the first time in a decade that bots outnumbered people in its data. The figure rose to 53% in 2025.
- Cloudflare: CEO Matthew Prince had predicted bots would pass people by 2027. It happened in the first half of 2026 instead, driven mostly by AI assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini browsing the web for their users.
- AI growth: OpenAI’s crawler traffic grew about 305% in one year, and HUMAN Security reported AI-agent traffic up roughly 7,800% year over year.
Dealer websites are on the losing end of the AI boom
On many dealer websites, bots now make up more than half of all traffic. That inflates visits and makes conversion metrics look worse than they really are.
Hosting and security costs are climbing fast
Behind the scenes, website providers have had to upgrade their server environments to handle the extra load, and that’s only the beginning. Rising fees from security networks like Cloudflare and higher bills for Google Cloud servers can no longer be ignored.
One website vendor told me their server costs have risen more than 300% over the past two years, and I don’t think they’re alone. Dealer.com (6,700+ sites), DealerOn (5,200+ sites) and Dealer Inspire (5,000+ sites) are likely absorbing millions of dollars in added infrastructure costs*.
Will MCPs and AI lower support costs, or raise them?
Motive is one of the first dealer website providers to announce an MCP connection, and others will follow. The idea is that dealers can use Claude or ChatGPT through the MCP to publish new content pages and optimize their site tags with AI automation.
But will these automated tools create more problems than they solve? Will website companies make dealers sign agreements that let them charge extra support fees when AI-driven changes break something the vendor didn’t cause?
I’m raising this publicly because the dealer website business has low margins and high support costs. OEM programs also let dealers switch providers often, with no long-term commitment. So will the largest website companies really absorb $3–8 million in new costs, or will they go to the OEMs and raise prices?
The “build it yourself” mindset: pros and cons
As dealers start building their own middleware, they’ll need to think harder than ever about software costs, support and security. Most dealer-built applications that went to market have failed, and only a few have succeeded. I raise this because the ongoing cost of supporting AI tools isn’t in most dealer budgets yet.
Our industry needs to adopt new business models sooner rather than later. Data security and application connectivity will be hot topics in the months ahead. Few people have thought through what it costs to support off-the-shelf products tied together with custom-built connectors.
That’s especially true once the person who built those connectors leaves the dealership.
*Counts of websites by provider are estimated by Pasch Group based on internal research.
