Official data from the Cloudflare Radar service shows that bots and AI agents have surpassed humans for the first time in history and taken up to 62% of all internet traffic.
The Internet has just crossed a line that many will not like. For the first time in history, bots have surpassed human internet traffic.
Co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, announced that the sudden growth of so-called agent traffic is responsible for this historic turnaround. The prince admitted that he had expected this outcome, but he believed that the transition would only happen at the end of 2027.
The shift in favor of bots has quietly taken place over the past few months.
According to the official data of the Cloudflare Radar service, bots currently account for about 56% of the total traffic on the network, while during the past week that percentage went up to 62%.
It is interesting that this traffic is not evenly distributed around the world. For example, Gibraltar has an extreme ratio where automated requests make up over 90% of all traffic, while Singapore and Iran record over 75%.
Experts explain that this does not mean that there are the most bot developers in those countries, but rather locations with strong hosting infrastructure, VPN services and specific routing.
By comparison, bots accounted for about 42% of web traffic in 2024. However, the explosion of AI agents that browse the Internet and perform tasks on behalf of humans has completely changed the digital landscape.
Unlike old internet browsers or fraud bots, these new AI agents behave almost like real people, only they do it incomparably faster and on a much larger scale.
How AI agents took over the internet
The main reason for this jump is that just one request from a human can trigger an avalanche of automated visits. When a person, for example, is looking for a new camera, he personally visits about five sites.
On the other hand, an AI agent tasked with comparing prices and specifications for that same human can visit as many as 5,000 sites per second. The result is an internet where bots talk to other bots en masse.
Although a good part of this activity is not malicious, as bots index pages and collect useful information, they still create a huge load for servers and completely distort the statistics of site visits.
This directly threatens business models that live off the visits of real people and the display of advertisements. Media publishers are particularly affected, as data shows that Google search users are 50% less likely to click on a traditional link when AI immediately offers them a ready-made text preview.
Many welcomed this data as proof that the famous “Theory of the Dead Internet” has become a reality. However, Cloudflare notes that these numbers only measure technical requirements, not actual attention and time.
People still spend most of their time watching videos, scrolling through social media, shopping and arguing with strangers online.
Regardless, the situation is changing at an alarming rate. The open web is rapidly blue-chip AI agents dictating what people will see next, while the web is already seeing a dangerous trend where one in ten AI reviews cite content previously generated by another AI, it says NOISE.
