Humans are getting outnumbered online, and Cloudflare thinks it will happen sooner than most expect.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince reckons AI-driven bot traffic will surpass human internet traffic by 2027 because agents fire off wildly more web requests than people ever will.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said: “If a human were doing a task such as shopping for a digital camera — and you might go to five websites. Your agent or the bot that’s doing that will often go to 1,000 times the number of sites that an actual human would visit.”
“So it might go to 5,000 sites. And that’s real traffic, and that’s real load, which everyone is having to deal with and take into account.”
TechCrunch reports that before generative AI, the internet was about 20 per cent bot traffic, with Google’s web crawler the largest share, and the rest split between legitimate crawlers and outright crooks.
With generative AI and its appetite for data, Prince says Cloudflare suspects that by 2027, bot traffic will exceed human traffic.
He says the shift will require fresh plumbing, including sandboxes for AI agents that can be spun up quickly and torn down when the job is done, like a disposable browser environment for code.
Prince said: “What we’re trying to think about is, how do we actually build that underlying infrastructure where you can, as easily as you open a new tab in your browser, you can actually spin up new code, which can then run and service the agents that are out there.”
He thinks there will be a point where millions of these sandboxes are created every second, a number that makes capacity planners reach for the aspirin.
“I think the thing that people don’t appreciate about AI is it’s a platform shift,” Prince said.
