Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince predicts that bot traffic will overtake human activity on the web by 2027. This shift is driven by the rise of generative AI and automated agents that process data at an unprecedented scale.
The Scale of Automated Activity
According to Prince, while a human typically visits around five websites to make a decision, an AI bot can browse up to 5,000 pages to perform the same task. This massive increase in page requests threatens to strain global internet infrastructure.
From Search Engines to AI
Before the AI boom, bots accounted for roughly 20% of web traffic, with Google’s crawler being the most prominent. Now, the rapid expansion of automated agents is creating new challenges for online businesses and service providers who must manage this surging non-human load.
