Years ago, who would have thought that bots would overtake humans online? Well, it has officially happened; even top industry experts, such as Cloudflare’s CEO, are a bit shocked by how quickly this happened.
New data shows that bots have overtaken humans online
A few months ago, Cloudflare’s CEO predicted that bot traffic would surpass human traffic by 2027. However, according to new reports, the crossover has happened much faster than the predicted time. Recently, Matthew Prince acknowledged on X that bot traffic and AI agents have now overtaken human traffic online. This was made public through live trend data publication on the Cloudflare Radar dashboard.
In case you don’t know, the Cloudflare Radar dashboard is designed to track traffic patterns across the internet. This explains why the CEO was able to discover the rapid increase in bot traffic over human traffic.
In the past, the CEO explained the logic behind why bots will overtake humans online. He mentioned that humans can open about five sites while surfing the net or shopping. As for AI agents, they can always open thousands of pages just to provide answers to a single query.
Generative AI contributed to this new trend
Before the era of generative AI, the Cloudflare Radar dashboard only accounted for about 20 percent of internet traffic coming from bots. At this time, Google’s crawler contributed the most to this figure. With the introduction of generative AI, the figure started to see a significant increase.
With AI agents being able to surf the web at a cheaper cost, one shouldn’t be too surprised at the rate at which these bots have overtaken humans online. But will this have a significant effect on the industry at large? The answer is still unclear. But what we’re sure of is that humans will, at some point, only account for a fraction of the internet traffic. For now, the figure only sits at 57.2% (for bots) to 42.8% (human traffic).
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