Bot web traffic has overtaken human web traffic, data shows
Cloudflare says 57.4% of requests to a selection of websites it hosts are now automated bot requests, while 42.6% are human-generated.
By Samantha Elkins
Website traffic from AI agents and bots has eclipsed its human-generated counterpart for the first time, according to Cloudflare, an earlier-than-expected milestone that speaks to AI’s rapid advance and impact.
“Welp, that happened faster than I predicted,” Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, one of the largest internet hosting services, wrote Thursday on X.
“Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027,” he continued, “but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet’s history.”
The rise is attributed to the continued proliferation of AI agents, largely autonomous programs that use tools that collaborate with high-level programs and data, with little human feedback.
Cloudflare, which has a feature to display bot versus human-generated search requests, says 57.4% of requests are now initiated by bots, compared with 42.6% coming from humans.