TL;DR Bots passed humans on the open web. IP reputation feeds stopped working for residential traffic. IPv4 prices collapsed. AI crawlers became a measurable tax on public sites. And Europe finally started writing big GDPR checks while only fining 1.3% of complaints. If you ship anything that touches the public web at scale, the IP infrastructure you set up in 2022 is doing more harm than good in 2026. The headline numbers: 51% of all web traffic in 2024 was automated. Bots beat humans for the first time in a decade. (Imperva 2025 Bad Bot Report) 37% was bad bots specifically, up from 32% in 2023. Sixth straight yearly increase. 2.8% of websites tested in 2025 were fully protected against bots, down from 8.4% the year before. (DataDome 2025 Global Bot Security Report) 78% of residential-IP sessions in a 4-billion-session study evaded conventional IP reputation feeds. (GreyNoise / IPInfo, April 2026) <$21/IP for large-block IPv4 transfers in May 2025. Roughly a 10-year low.…