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The answer seems to be that no one really does.  How about this: internet traffic is half-fake and everyone's known it for years, but there's no incentive to actually acknowledge it.

With very few exceptions, no media property big or small, new or old, online or off, can truly tell you how big its audience is. They may have never thought about it that way — after all, we all get as close as we can to what we think is a reasonably accurate estimation, though we have no way of confirming that — but all these numbers are actually good for (maybe) is relative comparisons. What does it really mean when someone says "a million people" saw something? Or ten or a hundred million? We don't know, and neither do you.

A very interesting article on a matter we all know is subject to wild speculation and guesswork but we don't want to discuss it.

A new report reveals that in 2022, 47.4% of all internet traffic came from bots, a 5.1% increase over the previous year. The same report showed that human traffic, at 52.6%, decreased to its lowest level in eight years.

This week, Imperva released its 10^th annual Bad Bot Report, a global analysis of automated bot traffic across the internet. The annual report provides security and business leaders with information about the evolution of bot technology and automated traffic. This year’s report also documents milestones in the evolution of bad bot technology.  For the fourth consecutive year, the volume of bad bot traffic — malicious automated software applications capable of high-speed abuse, misuse and attacks — grew to 30.2%, a 2.5% increase over 2021.