ISP proxies, AI crawlers, and the slow death of datacenter IPs: 2026 in numbers

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 f