Ai Bots Outnumber Humans Online What Cloudflare Matthew Prince Says

Amid the growing adoption of AI agents, traffic from bots has surpassed human traffic online for the first time in the history of the internet, according to Cloudflare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince.

Prince had earlier estimated that the milestone will be recorded sometime in 2027. However, he was surprised that it happened sooner than expected.

“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,” Prince wrote in a post on X on June 3.

In replies to the post, Prince noted that the date of the human versus bot traffic crossover was not clear as the data is “a bit messy”. Nevertheless, we are “clearly on the other side now,” he added.

The web infrastructure and cloud services provider has been tracking autonomous AI agents that browse the web much like humans on behalf of humans. The web usage of bots has been increasing alongside the growth of generative AI because bots are capable of visiting far more sites to get answers for users’ chatbot queries.

These AI agents are being deployed to carry out multi-step tasks online such as reading product pages, checking hotel prices, comparing flight prices, scrape and index web content for AI models, and act as personal assistants to order food as well as handle customer service interactions, according to Cloudflare.

Since last year, Cloudflare said it has been classifying traffic according to signed agents, verified bots, etc. The findings from Cloudflare could potentially mark a major shift from humans clicking around the web and being the primary customers of the internet to AI agents doing these tasks mostly on their own.

However, it is important to note that the new surge in internet traffic is attributed to these new types of AI agents rather than traditional bots such as website crawlers, search indexers, and malicious bots.

Bot traffic comprises 57.5 per cent of the internet traffic whereas human web traffic, which mostly comprises HTTP requests, is at 42.5 per cent, according to Cloudflare’s latest report. Cloudflare metrics only measure HTTP requests, not engagement.

However, based on other metrics such as total time spent in app usage, streaming, and infinite-scrolling feeds, human users are still the primary users of the web. It is only in rapid-fire page-load requests that automated agents have overtaken human users.

Cloudflare also provided a breakdown of human versus bot traffic by country, with over 92.1 per cent of bot traffic coming from the tiny island of Gibraltar, followed by Singapore (76.4 per cent), and Iran (76.4 per cent).

Iran’s high bot count may come from the heavy use of VPNs with automated scraping and bypass tools. Cloudflare has previously flagged Iran as a hotspot for malicious bot activity.