Cloudflare reckons bots have finally overtaken humans online.
Cloudflare chief executive and co-founder Matthew Prince told Tom’s Hardware that rapid rise in agentic internet traffic means “bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet’s history, which happened faster than predicted.”
He had previously announced that the crossover world arrive sometime in 2027. This new flood of traffic is not the old bot parade of website crawlers, search indexers, fraud scripts and abuse bots.
Cloudflare is tracking agents that browse the web much like humans, but on behalf of humans. The difference is that these agents are already operating at a massive scale.
The outfit has warned before about the scope of AI bot activity. Last year, it began classifying traffic from these new website visitors, including signed agents and verified bots.
Cloudflare reckons AI agents are reading product pages, checking prices and comparing flights. They are carrying out multi-step online tasks, scraping and indexing web content for AI models rather than search engines.
They are acting as personal assistants for ordering food, shopping, comparing products and dealing with customer service interactions. At the time of writing, Cloudflare data suggests bot traffic has pulled well ahead of human web traffic.
HTTP requests are split 57.5 per cent for bots and 42.5 per cent for humans. That is a hefty shift from humans clicking around as the web’s main customers to AI agents doing the drudge work for them.
The pace even surprised Prince.
