Bot web traffic has overtaken human web traffic, data shows

Traffic to websites from AI agents and bots has eclipsed human-generated web traffic for the first time, marking a landmark in AI’s progress and impact earlier than expected, according to one of the largest internet hosting services, Cloudflare. “Welp, that happened faster than I predicted. 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,” Matthew Prince, Co-founder & CEO of Cloudflare, wrote in a Thursday X post, linking to Cloudflare’s traffic analysis webpage. The rise is attributed to the continued growth of AI agents, largely autonomous programs that use tools that collaborate with high-level programs and data, with little human feedback. Cloudflare’s website, which has a feature to display bot versus human-generated search requests, says that 57.4% of requests are now automated bot requests compared to 42.6% human generated internet requests, based on a sample of traffic to websites it hosts. Humans might browse five websites before making a purchase, however, an AI service might browse 5,000 websites. This increase in search requests explains how online bot traffic jumped to over 55%, surpassing human-generated traffic. The exact day the AI agents and bots surpassed human activity remains unclear. In response to a comment under his X post, Prince wrote that the data is “a bit messy (so charts are too). But clearly on the other side now.” In an interview with NBC News, Prince said he remains “stunned by the rate of growth,” of non-human traffic online, and explained that the increasing rate of bot traffic could have widespread implications. “2015 through 2025 the web actually shrank,” he said. 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later due to deleted websites and inactive links, according to a Pew Research Center report. “That flipped starting in the last six months, and we’ve seen now just exponential growth of the web, and really interesting, creative things, and that again is being powered by AI.” In response to the news, some commenters have brought up the “dead internet theory” — the idea that with the rise of AI, the internet will largely be composed of bots interacting with one another, and that humans and their content will largely be rendered irrelevant. Prince says he thinks the growing use of AI actually is proving the theory wrong. “I think a lot of people kind of have said, well, this has proved sort of the dead internet theory, I think that’s actually kind of wrong at a lot, a lot of levels,” he said. “You don’t need to be a web designer, you don’t need to know how to program in order to create these things anymore. It’s given access to content creation to a much broader audience.” The rise in bot traffic also raises questions about how the internet’s business model will operate in the future, Prince said, as the growth threatens advertisers, content creators and website operators because “bots don’t click on ads.” One way to reconstruct the internet business model is to charge bots money in order to access digital users’ content. If implemented effectively and correctly, “we actually might be on the cusp of the golden age of the internet,” Prince said. “If the bots’ pay a lot, maybe we can make the web free for the humans again, and I think that’s actually kind of an idealistic outcome that we’re trying to figure out if we can help catalyze,” Prince said.