Javed Iqbal:
Lahore:Bots have passed human traffic online for the first time in the internet’s history, driven by the rapid rise of AI agents that browse and act on websites on behalf of users.
Cloudflare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince said the shift happened faster than he expected. He had previously predicted that bot traffic would overtake human traffic by 2027, but the latest data shows the crossover has already happened.
AI Agents Drive The Shift
This new wave of bot traffic is different from traditional automated activity such as search crawlers, website indexers, fraud bots, and abuse bots.
Cloudflare is tracking a growing class of agentic traffic, where AI agents browse the web in ways that are closer to human behavior. These agents can read product pages, compare prices, check flights, scrape and index content for AI models, order food, handle shopping tasks, and manage customer service interactions.
The growth of these agents has changed how the web is being used. Instead of humans clicking through websites directly, more online tasks are now being carried out by automated systems acting for users.
Bots Now Lead HTTP Requests
Cloudflare data shows bots now account for about 57.5% of HTTP requests, compared with 42.5% for human traffic.
Prince noted that the exact timing of the crossover is difficult to pin down because the data is messy. However, he said the internet is now clearly on the other side of the shift.
The figures measure HTTP requests, not total online engagement. Humans still dominate areas such as app usage, video streaming and social feeds, which do not generate the same rapid volume of web page requests as automated agents.
Country Level Data
Cloudflare country-level data shows some regions with especially high bot traffic.
Gibraltar had the highest share at about 92.1%, followed by Singapore and Iran at about 76.4% each.