Internet traffic has reached a historic milestone, with automated bots and AI-powered agents now generating more web activity than human users, according to internet infrastructure company Cloudflare.
Data from the firm’s Cloudflare Radar platform indicates that bots account for around 57% of requests to standard webpages across a sample of websites, leaving human-generated traffic at roughly 43%.
Cloudflare chief executive Matthew Prince said the crossover occurred sooner than expected, noting he had predicted automated traffic would not surpass human activity until 2027. The surge has largely been driven by increasingly capable AI agents that can search, analyse and retrieve information from thousands of webpages in seconds, performing tasks that would take people significantly longer.
As machine-to-machine interactions become a larger share of online activity, concerns are growing about the future of the internet’s advertising-driven economy, the rise of automated content ecosystems, and whether websites may eventually begin charging AI systems for access to information.
The trend has also renewed debate over claims that much of today’s online activity is no longer driven by people, while studies continue to show large portions of the early web disappearing as the internet evolves into an environment increasingly shaped by automation.
