Web traffic from bots and AI agents is now higher in volume than traffic produced by people, according to an executive at tech company Cloudflare.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said on X Wednesday that traffic from AI agents increased faster than he anticipated, and that he had initially expected bot traffic to beat out human traffic sometime next year.
A tracker on the Cloudflare website shows that bots, including AI agents, make up just over 57% of all Internet traffic, compared to almost 43% for human beings.
Mr. Prince told NBC News that the change in what is causing the most traffic could lead to other sea changes in the Internet economy because, unlike people, “bots don’t click on ads.” He suggested that charging bots for access to digital content could become a new business model for the internet.
Humans still account for the majority of the time spent on the internet. While bots access pages faster and generate more traffic by volume, people spend more time inside web apps, streaming content and scrolling feeds, according to technology website Tom’s Hardware.
