Automated traffic has already exceeded human traffic on the Internet, and in the next five years the gap could grow up to 1,000 times.
Automated traffic has already exceeded human traffic on the Internet, and in the next five years the gap could grow up to 1,000 times.
This forecast was made by Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert during a conference call dedicated to the company’s financial results for the second quarter of 2026.
According to Seifert, in May, the Cloudflare team informed management that non-human traffic had exceeded human-generated traffic for the first time.
«I was quite surprised when our team came to me in May of this year and said, ‘You won’t believe it, but the volume of non-human traffic on the Internet has already exceeded human traffic,’» the CFO said.
If current trends continue, in five years automated traffic could be 1,000 times greater than human traffic, he believes.
«Humans will become a statistical error on the internet not because human traffic will decrease, but because of how quickly non-human traffic is growing,» Seifert added.
This happened faster than Cloudflare itself expected. The company previously predicted that machine traffic would surpass human traffic only in 2027. In July, Cloudflare announced that this milestone had already been passed: automated traffic generates approximately 57% of all web queries.
The company tracks the ratio of human to bot traffic through its global infrastructure and Cloudflare Radar. In May 2026, Radar also received additional tools to analyze the composition of HTTP traffic and separately track human and bot requests.
The main factor behind this acceleration has been the popularity of artificial intelligence. This includes not only traditional search crawlers or botnets, but also AI agents and systems that independently access websites, search for information, compare products, and perform other actions online.
For Cloudflare, this means more than just an increase in infrastructure strain. The company is also having to become increasingly good at distinguishing between useful automated traffic and malicious activity. «Not all machine traffic is useful,» Seifert said. It could be hackers and other malicious actors, he said. But automated requests can also pose problems for a site’s business model.
For example, an AI company might collect ad-supported media content in bulk. While this traffic may be necessary for the AI service to operate, it may not necessarily be profitable for the content owner. That’s why Cloudflare is already developing tools to monitor AI bots. In July, the company launched Precursor, a behavioral analytics system that aims to detect automated traffic without traditional CAPTCHAs. The company is also outspoken about changing the very fabric of the internet: automated agents and bots already generate more than half of web requests.
The forecast comes amid strong financial results for Cloudflare. In the second quarter of 2026, the company’s revenue grew by 36% year-over-year to $696 million. The number of large customers with annual revenue over $100,000 increased to 4,698.
Thus, the paradox of the new internet is that humans generate an ever-smaller share of traffic, but it is machines that create a huge new class of load on the infrastructure.
And if Seifert’s prediction comes true, the question for Internet companies in the coming years will no longer be just how to attract more people to the site, but also which bots to allow to enter there, what to show them, and who should pay for this access.
