Bots and AI agents now generate over half of all web traffic

Web traffic produced by bots and AI agents now exceeds traffic from human users, Cloudflare reported. A tracker on the company's website shows bots, including AI agents, accounting for just over 57 percent of all internet traffic while humans generate almost 43 percent.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said on X Wednesday that AI agent traffic grew faster than expected. He had initially projected that bot traffic would surpass human traffic sometime next year.

Shift in traffic patterns Prince told NBC News that the change could affect the internet economy because bots do not click on ads. He suggested that charging bots for access to digital content might become a new business model. Humans still account for the majority of time spent online.

People spend more time inside web apps, streaming content, and scrolling feeds, while bots access pages faster and generate higher traffic volume, according to technology website Tom's Hardware.