Bot traffic has overtaken human traffic on the internet for the first time in history. Mark Tyson reports for Tom’s Hardware that Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince publicly acknowledged the milestone, admitting he had not expected it to happen until 2027. “Welp, that happened faster than I predicted,” Prince wrote.
According to Cloudflare data, bots now account for 57.5 percent of all HTTP requests on the web, compared to 42.5 percent generated by humans. Prince noted the data is “a bit messy” but said the internet is “clearly on the other side now.”
A new kind of bot
This shift is not driven by traditional bots such as search crawlers or fraud tools. The new wave consists of AI agents. These are automated programs that browse the web on behalf of users, performing tasks like comparing prices, checking flight options, scraping content for AI models, ordering food, and handling customer service interactions.
Cloudflare began classifying this type of traffic separately only recently, which is why historical data on it is limited.
What the numbers actually mean
The figures measure HTTP requests, not engagement or time spent online. Human users still dominate in areas like app usage, video streaming, and social media browsing. These activities generate far fewer page-load requests than automated agents do.
Cloudflare also broke down bot traffic by country. Gibraltar tops the list with 92.1 percent bot traffic, followed by Singapore and Iran, both at 76.4 percent. The high figures for Singapore reflect its concentration of data centers. Iran’s numbers, Cloudflare suggests, are linked to widespread VPN use combined with automated scraping tools. The company has previously identified Iran as a hotspot for malicious bot activity.
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