AI-generated traffic surpasses human activity on internet for 1st time, Cloudflare says

Automated systems powered by artificial intelligence now generate more internet traffic than humans for the first time in history, according to new data from web infrastructure company Cloudflare.

The company said 57.4% of requests made to websites on its network now come from bots and artificial intelligence agents, while humans account for 42.6% of web traffic.

The shift has been driven largely by the rapid growth of AI-powered chatbots and autonomous digital agents that search the internet, gather information and perform tasks with little or no human intervention.

"Welp, that happened faster than I predicted," Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince wrote on US social media company X.

"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," he said.

According to Prince, AI systems can process information at a scale far beyond human capabilities.

Speaking to NBC News, he noted that a person typically visits around five websites before making an online purchase, while an AI chatbot can compare information from thousands of pages in a much shorter period of time.

The trend extends beyond web searches and online shopping, according to the report.

Social media platforms are increasingly being shaped by automated accounts used to publish content and comments, sometimes for political or propaganda purposes.

At the same time, entirely AI-focused online ecosystems are beginning to emerge. One example is Moltbook, a platform designed exclusively for artificial intelligence agents.

According to Italian news agency ANSA, the network attracted 1.6 million autonomous agents in its first week, developing their own communication patterns and community structures without human participation.

The rise of autonomous AI systems has also fueled development efforts by major technology companies. Firms, including Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI, are investing in so-called "agentic AI" capable of independently navigating websites and carrying out online tasks.

Prince linked the development to the so-called "dead internet theory," which suggests that bots could eventually dominate online activity, leaving human-generated content and interactions increasingly marginal.

Despite concerns about the future of the web, Prince argued that AI agents could also create new economic models online.

"From a certain perspective, we could be on the threshold of a new golden age for the internet," he said.