AI bots have overtaken humans in accessing websites and driving their traffic, crossing a milestone earlier than expected, according to a report by the tech company Cloudflare.
“Agentic traffic has been growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the internet’s history,” Cloudflare chief Matthew Prince said. “Thought it would be the end of 2027, then early 2027. Welp, that happened faster than I predicted.”
Thanks to the increasing use of autonomous software programmes to survey and scrape the internet for data, nearly 58 per cent of all requests to access websites are now initiated by AI agents and bots, according to the Cloudflare report.
The shift took place even as the number of websites on the internet shrank over the past decade or so.
A Pew report noted that nearly 40 per cent of websites that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible by 2023. They had either been deleted or made inactive.
In contrast, experts say, websites powered by AI are now growing exponentially. “We’ve seen now just exponential growth of the web and really interesting, creative things, and that again is being powered by AI,” Mr Prince told NBC News.
The Cloudflare findings followed a report by the security firm Imperva indicating that bots were behind just over 50 per cent of web traffic in 2017.
Imperva’s analysis of nearly 17 billion website visits from across 100,000 domains found that bots were ahead of humans in driving traffic.
Worryingly, however, harmful “attack bots” were responsible for nearly 30 per cent of the web traffic, it warned. “For the past five years, every third website visitor was an attack bot,” cybersecurity expert Igal Zeifman wrote in a blogpost at the time.
“Simply put, Good bots will crawl your website and bad bots will try to hack it regardless of how popular it is with the human folk.”
It was unclear exactly when AI agents and bots significantly surpassed human activity.
“Last few months. Data a bit messy. But clearly on the other side now,” Mr Prince said.
