According to Cloudflare, the amount of internet traffic generated by automated bots and AI agents has officially exceeded the activity of real users, earlier than the company’s CEO Matthew Prince predicted.
According to Cloudflare, the amount of internet traffic generated by automated bots and AI agents has officially exceeded the activity of real users, earlier than the company’s CEO Matthew Prince predicted.
According to recent statistics from the service, which provides security and content delivery for millions of websites, the balance of power on the Internet has now tilted in favor of automated systems.
Bots currently account for 57,5% of all HTTP requests on the web, while humans account for only 42,5%. It was recently thought that this threshold would not be crossed until 2027.
«Well, it happened faster than I predicted. At first, I thought it would happen in late 2027, then early 2027, but bot traffic is growing so rapidly that for the first time in the history of the Internet, bots have surpassed human traffic,» said Matthew Prince.
The main reason for this leap was the development of generative artificial intelligence. Modern AI agents perform tasks for users, visiting a huge number of Internet pages to search and analyze information. They compare prices for goods, search for flights, read product descriptions and work as personal assistants.
However, experts note that Cloudflare’s statistics measure the number of technical HTTP requests, not real-time engagement. If we consider the hours spent watching videos or scrolling through social media feeds, humans are still the main consumers of content. However, their activity generates significantly fewer fast page load requests than automated systems.
Currently, the highest concentration of bot traffic has been recorded in Gibraltar (92.1%), Singapore (76.4%), and Iran (76.4%). While the first two locations have an excess of hosting infrastructure and data centers, analysts attribute Iran’s high figures to the active use of VPN services and tools for automatically bypassing government blocks.
