Bot traffic surpasses human internet traffic for first time, Cloudflare CEO reports
By
Mark Tyson
Baker's choice. Dense with flavour, light on filler.
Summary
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince reports that automated bot traffic has surpassed human traffic on the internet for the first time, with bots accounting for 57.5% of HTTP requests versus 42.5% from humans. This shift happened faster than anticipated — Prince had previously predicted the crossover wouldn't occur until 2027. The article distinguishes this new "agentic" bot traffic from traditional web crawlers, highlighting the accelerating impact of AI-driven automation on internet usage patterns.
Key quotes
· 3 pulledBots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet's history.
Welp, that happened faster than I predicted.
Bot (automated) vs. human HTTP requests are split 57.5 vs. 42.5 percent, according to the firm's latest data.
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