In its second-quarter results, US internet infrastructure and security provider Cloudflare said automated traffic has grown faster than expected. Thomas Seifert, the company’s chief financial officer, warned that within a few years human activity online could become a rounding error because a large share of internet requests are already generated by machines.
Measurements and figures
According to Cloudflare’s data, in June 2026 bots accounted for roughly 56 percent of internet traffic, and at some times that proportion rose to 62 percent. The company had previously forecast that bot traffic would surpass human traffic by the end of 2027; the recent figures indicate that threshold has been reached earlier.
What's driving the increase? Agent-based AI
Cloudflare and industry commentators point to agent-based artificial intelligence systems as the main driver of the surge in non-human traffic. These AI agents behave in ways similar to normal browsing but operate at machine speed and can repeat operations at very large scale. As noted by technology outlets such as Techspot, while a human might view 10–100 pages in an hour, an AI agent can traverse tens of thousands or even millions in the same period.
Matthew Prince, Cloudflare’s CEO and co-founder, illustrated the gap with an online shopping example: a human shopping for a camera might check five retailers, whereas an AI agent could scan thousands of sites. Multiply that behaviour across millions of users asking assistants to compare products, search for flights, research topics, gather facts or summarize articles, and the company argues it becomes clear why human-driven web traffic could look negligible in raw network volume.
Consequences: the "zero-click" web and funding risks
Cloudflare warns the trend could change what we recognize as the web. Increasingly, people turn to AI assistants that read and summarize web content, and users consume the AI’s summary rather than clicking through to the original pages. This so-called "zero-click" web delivers information to users but deprives the original content producers of direct visits.
If newspapers, specialist sites, forums and blogs lose visitors and revenue, they may produce less original content. Cloudflare notes this can become a vicious cycle: fewer reliable sources make it harder for AI systems to draw on trustworthy material, which over time could degrade the quality of AI outputs.
Technical and commercial responses
Seifert said that if internet traffic continues on the projected path, participants will need to become much more efficient — a space where Cloudflare’s services come into play. The company introduced a one-click AI-bot blocking feature in 2024, available free to all Cloudflare customers. That approach has been extended: site owners can now choose whether to permit AI crawlers, specify permitted uses of their content, and require payment for access.
Cloudflare also developed a system called AI Labyrinth: when a bot ignores site restrictions, the company can funnel it into a network of AI-generated, interconnected pages to waste the bot’s resources.
Summary
Cloudflare’s measurements and executive assessments indicate agent-based AI already generates the majority of network traffic. The shift raises technical, business and content-production challenges: new controls and monetization models may be needed to preserve the sustainability of original content creation and to safeguard the quality of information available to both humans and AI systems.
