Cloudflare CEO: Automated bot traffic surpasses human internet traffic for first time
By
Mark Tyson
Pure flour-power. Hearty enough to carry you through lunch.
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 and search engine bots, 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.
Agentic traffic wasn't expected to eclipse real people until next year.
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