AI bot traffic is set to eclipse human presence online by 2027

Two more years and bots will have taken over the internet, says Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince. The AI wave isn’t coming – it’s already here, all thanks to generative AI tools.

The internet is changing faster than people can adapt to it. Humans are losing ground dramatically when performing tasks such as browsing product listings in online shops. While we continue to scroll through pairs of jeans and smartphones that catch our attention, bots swarm thousands of webpages and, in a matter of seconds, do what a crowd of people couldn’t in a day.

By 2027, AI bot traffic could surpass human activity online entirely, reshaping how we interact with the web, how businesses operate, and how information flows, said Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince at the SXSW tech conference in Austin this week.

“Let's say you were shopping for a digital camera, and you might go to five websites. Your agent or the bot will often go to a thousand times the number of sites that an actual human would visit. So it might go to 5000 sites, and that's real traffic, and that's real load, which everyone is having to deal with, and take into account,” said Prince.

According to him, before AI became as approachable as it is now, with so many services on the market and high user demand, bots accounted for about 20% of web traffic. Most of it came from trusted crawlers such as Google. The rest? Mostly hackers, scammers, and “all kinds of sort of miscreants that were online.”

Cybernews has checked it out ourselves. In an experiment, our journalist Ernestas Naprys created a brand new, completely empty .com website that was visited 21,620 times from 1,400 unique “users.” However, the visitors were bots that ranged from engine crawlers to malicious scanners, and they were looking for security holes: vulnerabilities, data, or exploitable features.

Now in Austin, Prince claimed that the bot takeover is accelerating. He called the need for data “insatiable” and predicted that “in 2027, the amount of bot traffic online will exceed the amount of human traffic that's online. And it will continue to grow.”

“This isn’t just a traffic problem. It’s a tech challenge. Companies will need to invent “sandboxes” – temporary digital workspaces for bots to run tasks, then vanish,” he said.

“What we're trying to think about is how do we actually build that underlying infrastructure where you can, as easily as you open a new tab in your browser, you can actually spin up new code, which can then run and service the agents that are out there.”

The infrastructure to support a digital ecosystem for AI is demanding – data centers, servers, and constant uptime – and Prince compares it to the early pandemic period, when everything went online all of a sudden.

“Internet traffic doubled, and we were really concerned that the amount of traffic was just going to completely overwhelm... the internet was buckling under the strain,” said Prince.

However, unlike the COVID spike, the growth we Prince comments on nowadays in his eyes is relentless, shows no sign of stopping, and is expected to “explode over the next several years.”

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