“Wild times” as non-human traffic on the internet is set to overtake humans by 1,000x in 5 years
The bots are taking over.
Frustrated developer. Kittyfly/Shutterstock
- Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says non-human internet traffic could exceed human traffic by 1,000 times within five years.
- Cloudflare found non-human traffic already passed human traffic in May, much earlier than its earlier 2027 forecast.
- Prince warned some bot traffic is malicious, including hackers and AI companies scraping ad-supported media content.
- The shift could disrupt the advertising-based internet model, but Prince said future business models remain hard to predict.
Key Takeaways by nexos.ai, reviewed by Cybernews staff.
After admitting that his previous prediction on the growth of non-human traffic on the internet was wrong, Cloudflare's CEO is now expecting humans to become "a rounding error on the internet" in 5 years. This also comes with a malicious traffic warning.
According to Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of the internet giant, the share of human-related traffic will be minuscule, not because human traffic is declining, but because non-human traffic is growing so fast.
"And to give you a sense of how this trend is playing out, and with the big caveat that I have called it wrong at every point along the way – if the current trends continue, we think in 5 years, non-human traffic will be as much as 1,000x as much as human traffic," Prince said during an earnings call this week.
Looking at its numbers, the company has already found that non-human traffic surpassed human traffic online this past May, despite the CEO at the end of 2025 predicting that it would happen in the second half of 2027. Later, this prediction was revised to the first half of 2027, before the team informed their boss about the surprise this May.
However, this eye-watering growth brings negative outcomes too.
During the call, the CEO emphasized that some of that non-human traffic is malicious.
"And that could be malicious, like it's hackers or bad guys," Prince said, adding that it could also be malicious from the perspective of a particular customer's business model.
For example, an AI company may try to acquire content from a media company that relies on advertising.
The Cloudflare boss noted that in such malicious cases, they block that traffic and don't charge customers anything extra for it.
Prince concluded by saying that while the business model of the Internet for the last 27 years has been largely defined by advertising and really defined by Google, the next 27 years are going to be very different.
However, as Prince's failed attempts to predict even shorter periods of time in this new environment showed, the new models are hardly predictable either.
