Cloudflare CEO says bot internet traffic has overtaken humans

"Welp, that happened faster than I predicted."

That's what Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince had to say as his company released data finding that there's now more traffic from bots than humans on the internet.

"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," said Prince.

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Cloudflare is perhaps one of the most integral companies on the web, providing services like CDN (Content Delivery Network) and DDoS mitigation for some of the biggest sites on the internet. Cloudflare basically helps popular sites handle all the traffic they receive, so the company is certainly an expert in this realm.

Cloudflare's data shows that at any given point during a day, between 52 percent and 62 percent of traffic on the internet comes from bots. Over the past seven days, Cloudflare says roughly 57.4 percent of traffic has been the result of bots, which includes search crawlers from companies like Google and AI bots from other AI companies. Around 42.5 percent of internet traffic has been from humans.

Cloudflare's data also breaks down which countries have the most bot-related traffic, which provides even more interesting insight. The island of Gibraltar ranks first in bot traffic with a whopping 92.1 percent. Singapore comes in second with 76.3 percent, closely followed by Iran with 76.2 percent. Rounding out the top five countries in bot traffic are Ireland, with 72.8 percent, and the Netherlands, with 68.8 percent.

Bots such as website crawlers and search indexers have been around since the early days of the internet. But there hasn't been a sudden surge in those types of bots. Cloudflare's data shows that the uptick has been the result of AI agents or agentic AI bots scouring the web to both scrape content for data training and acting on behalf of human users utilizing AI assistants and chatbots.

But, as the tech outlet Tom's Hardware points out, Cloudflare's data only tracks website visits and not what the visitor, bot or human, is actually doing on the page. Humans actually consume the content on the webpages. Humans watch videos and read articles. They don't just scrape or index and move on to the next page as bots do. As a result, AI agents load more web pages than a human visitor, which helps explain the rising bot traffic.

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