Cloudflare Inc. co-founder and Chief Executive Matthew Prince says that artificial intelligence agents now drive the bulk of the internet’s traffic, having surpassed human web activity for the first time.
The milestone was crossed much earlier than most people had anticipated, in another illustration of the incredible pace of AI’s seemingly unstoppable rise. Prince announced the milestone in a post on X:
The claim is based on data from Cloudflare Radar, which is the company’s internet tracking tool. It shows that agentic bots now account for 57.4% of all web traffic, while humans now only generate 42.6%.
Prince said in a second post that the data is “a bit messy,” but still shows that AI agents are now indisputably the web’s biggest traffic drivers.
Some clarification is needed as to what Prince actually means when he talks about AI agent traffic. Standard bots, such as search engine crawlers and website performance tools, eclipsed human internet traffic more than a decade ago. It’s believed that those earlier bots likely exceeded human traffic on most smaller websites even longer ago, and the result was that many of those sites exceeded their web hosting limits much faster than their owners had anticipated.
What Prince is referring to when he talks about agentic bots is the systems that search the internet on behalf of users when they ask AI chatbots a question. When something like ChatGPT receives a prompt and needs to search the internet for the answer, it will scour hundreds of websites where it thinks it can find the information it needs. Cloudflare’s data shows that it’s these AI agents that are now visiting web pages more than real humans.
Though humans still engage with web content more than these AI agent bots do, they don’t look at nearly as many websites anymore. That makes sense, because if people are looking to buy a new pair of shoes online, for example, they might browse through four or five websites at the most before they settle on a product to purchase. In contrast, if they ask ChatGPT or Gemini to look for them, those chatbots may search up to 5,000 websites, based on the description of the shoes provided.
Cloudflare’s numbers reflect global traffic patterns, but there are some major differences when we look at different regions of the world. North America is skewed toward greater bot usage, with agents accounting for 68.6% of all web traffic emanating from there. Humans account for just 31.4%. But in the American Midwest, this trend reverses, with humans leading the way at 54.5% and agents lagging behind at 45.5% of traffic.
There are some interesting outliers in the data. For instance, in the tiny U.K. territory Gibraltar, bots accounted for a staggering 97% of all web traffic during peak hours. But in more authoritarian countries such as Cuba and Laos, humans are the most dominant web users, accounting for 80.8% and 84.7% of traffic, respectively.
Overall, North America, Europe and Africa are led by bots, while Asia, Oceania and South America still see more humans using the internet.
The dead internet
Responding to Prince’s post on X, some commenters said the data gives more weight to the rise of the “dead internet,” which is a theory that posits that web activity will one day be composed almost exclusively of AI agents interacting with one another. In the dead internet, humans and their content will be rendered almost irrelevant.
There is quite a bit of evidence pointing to this trend. For instance, studies show that around 40% of all Facebook posts are now generated by bots, while the music streaming platform Deezer said in April that 44% of all new songs uploaded to its platform were AI-generated. Moreover, an October report by Axios suggests that AI now creates 52% of all articles posted online.
Strangely, Prince told NBC News in an interview that he thinks the growing capabilities of AI show that the dead internet theory is wrong. “You don’t need to be a web designer, you don’t need to know how to program, in order to create these things anymore,” he said. “It’s given access to content creation to a much broader audience.”
Image: SiliconANGLE/Gemini
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