The CEO and co-founder of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, has now said it. Bots have passed human traffic online, as reported by Tom's Hardware. Bot vs. human HTTP requests are now split 57.5% vs. 42.5%, according to Cloudflare's latest data.
The rapid increase in "agentic internet traffic" means that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in internet's history. Previous expectations were that the crossover would happen sometime in 2027.
Cloudflare reckons that 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 and acting as personal assistants to order food, compare and shop, and handle customer service interactions.
It must be noted, that Cloudflare metrics measure HTTP requests, and 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.
And how about Cloudflare's breakdown of human/bot traffic by country? The most bot-ridden traffic comes from the island of Gibraltar (92.1%), followed by Singapore (76.4%), and then Iran (76.4%). Iran's high bot count may come from the heavy use of VPNs with automated scraping and bypass tools. Iran is also a hotspot for malicious bot activity.
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