‘Bots have now passed human traffic online,’ Cloudflare boss laments — says agentic traffic wasn’t expected to eclipse real people until next year
The rapid increase in agentic internet traffic means “bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet's history,” according to the CEO and co-founder of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince. “Welp, that happened faster than I predicted,” Prince awkwardly admitted, making his previous expectations of the crossover happening sometime in 2027 seem way off the mark. 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. https://t.co/2zX5bHdhsaJune 3, 2026 Before going on, it’s important to differentiate this new surge in internet traffic from the traditional bots most will be aware of, things like website crawlers, search indexers, and bad stuff like fraud or abuse bots. It is different now, as Cloudflare is charting agents that browse the web much like humans on behalf of humans, and it is already at a massive scale. You might wonder what all these AI agent bots are actually up to, particularly if you’re not running your own army of digital helpers. Thankfully, Cloudflare has addressed the scope of AI bot activity in previous articles and blogs. Also, last year it started classifying traffic according to these new website visitors (e.g., signed agents and verified bots), which is why the charts don’t go back very far. Cloudflare reckons these AI agents are online doing stuff like reading product pages, checking prices, performing multi-step tasks online like comparing flights, scraping and indexing web content (but for AI models, not search engines), and acting as personal assistants to order food, compare and shop, and handle customer service interactions. At the time of writing, Cloudflare data suggests that the balance between bot vs. human web traffic (HTTP requests) is already firmly favoring the former, split 57.5 vs. 42.5 percent. A major shift from humans clicking around, being the primary customers of the web, to AI agents doing these tasks has already happened. The rate of change has even taken Prince by surprise. In replies to the embedded Tweet, Prince also noted that the date of the human/bot crossover wasn’t clear as the “data [is] a bit messy.” Nevertheless, we are “clearly on the other side now,” he added. However, Cloudflare metrics measure HTTP requests, not engagement. Flesh-and-blood folks remain the primary users of the web in terms of total time spent in app usage, streaming, and infinite-scrolling feeds. These mediums simply don't generate the same volume of rapid-fire page-load requests as automated agents do. We were also interested in looking at Cloudflare’s breakdown of human/bot traffic by country. The most bot-ridden traffic comes from the tiny island of Gibraltar (92.1%), followed by Singapore (76.4%), then Iran (76.4%). While some of these places have a lot of data centers and hosting infrastructure compared to population size, Iran’s high bot count may rather come from the heavy use of VPNs with automated scraping and bypass tools. Cloudflare has also previously flagged Iran as a hotspot for malicious bot activity. Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds. Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason. - As a freelance professional with my own web presence, I wonder how this will change the nature of web design over time. If the majority of web browsing is done by bots, will that place less emphasis on good UI principles and artistic layouts that promote engagement with humans? Will websites be dumbed down in appearance and rely more on agents reading code?Reply - Most sites will be behind user access restrictions. Want to access it? login. No login, no access. That's the only way to work around the bot invasion.Reply If the majority of the accesses are from bots, who is paying for that access? Because the content authors (website owners) for sure are paying for the bandwidth / servers of their own sites. And now, the premises of having the site out there are broken. - I wonder what the advertisers think about this. They already pay huge money for ads that are never seen because of ad blockers. Do they get a 50% discount because a bot that will never buy anything saw the ad rather than a person.Reply - Dead Internet Theory comes to fruition.Reply Does anyone remember how the internet was advertised as a way to bring the world community together? And how that never panned out, instead creating isolation from your local community, and associated mental health issues. And now even the internet (human) communities are getting eroded by bots. Now's a good time to go touch some grass. - I own a website with a message board. We don't sell anything, it's just a small community discussing stuff but it has been around for decades so we have a *lot* of posts and content (you can see where this is going). But since late last year, the data usage of that board skyrocketed to tens of GB per day with a number of views that would rival large corporations.Reply Aside from wasting tons of bandwidth (that I'm paying for), those bots are so aggressive that they overwhelm my host and take the board offline (since I'm on a shared plan and not a dedicated server), then when the board goes offline (user exceeded the 'max_user_connections' limit), those bots think they have been IP banned, so the only reasonable thing to do is to try again using even more different IP to access the data. And here something some people may not be aware of: most ISP rent their IP to AI firms and trainers because it's free money for them. So banning IP is useless because when bots want your data, it's like a DDoS attack. And just yielding to them is useless, because they will come back again and again. So you can sure bet that this board is now only accessible to registered users. Do I like doing that? Not at all, but what else I am supposed to do? I spend more time dealing with these AI crawlers than I spend making my site better.... This is how damaging "AI" has become. - Agentic models are the latest fad, or so it seems?Reply Several years ago it was, "do you think this whole AI thing will affect m ywork?" Then, about 1-2yrs ago it was, "If youre not already using AI youre gonna fall behind". And now, "if youre not using agents already, youre not going to be marketable". You guys getting the same vibes? - I think a lot of us can tell bot traffic has surpassed human traffic. The number of fake accounts and slop content postings has gone way up this year.Reply I've been seeing an increasing number of people call for a "second internet" to counter what's happened with the current internet that's absolutely overrun by bots, spam, and advertisers.