Bot internet traffic surpasses human traffic globally, Cloudflare says

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince announced that internet traffic generated by bots has now surpassed that of human users globally, a historic first. Prince noted this crossover occurred sooner than he had predicted, attributing the surge to agentic AI bots that are rapidly growing. Cloudflare's data indicates that bots, including search engine crawlers and AI bots, accounted for approximately 57.4% of internet traffic over the past week, with a daily range of 52% to 62%. Human traffic comprised about 42.5%. The increase is largely driven by AI agents scraping web content for training and by AI assistants used by humans. The data also highlights countries with the highest bot traffic, with Gibraltar leading at 92.1%, followed by Singapore (76.3%), Iran (76.2%), Ireland (72.8%), and the Netherlands (68.8%). While traditional bots like crawlers have existed for years, the recent surge is attributed to AI agents. Cloudflare's data tracks website visits, and AI agents tend to load more pages than humans, contributing to the higher traffic numbers. Traffic from automated AI programs for human users also rose by about 8,000% last year.