Top News

AI bots to surpass human traffic on internet: Cloudflare CEO
20 Mar 2026

Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, has predicted that artificial intelligence (AI) bots will surpass human traffic on the internet by 2027.

Speaking at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin this week, he said that the rapid growth of AI technology is driving this trend.

He explained that bots can visit far more websites than humans do to get answers for their queries.

Prince illustrated the bot advantage with a shopping example
Bot advantage

Prince illustrated the bot advantage with a shopping example. He said if a human was looking for a digital camera, they would visit five websites. But a bot doing the same task could go to 5,000 sites.

This is real traffic and load that everyone has to deal with and take into account.

Before generative AI, internet was about 20% bot traffic
Traffic surge

Before the advent of generative AI, the internet was about 20% bot traffic. Prince said Google's web crawler was the largest contributor to this.

However, he noted that with the rise of generative AI and its insatiable need for data, we're seeing a spike in bot traffic.

He said he suspected that, in 2027, bot traffic online will exceed human traffic.

New technologies will be needed to handle this shift
Tech evolution

Prince also stressed that this shift will require new technologies, such as sandboxes for AI agents.

These could be created on the fly and dismantled once their job is done.

He envisions a future where millions of these "sandboxes" would be created every second as consumers ask AI agents to do tasks like planning vacations on their behalf.

Prince also highlighted physical infrastructure requirements for this shift
Infrastructure strain

Prince also highlighted the physical infrastructure requirements for this scale of internet usage by bots.

He recalled how during COVID-19, internet traffic surged so quickly that some parts of the web were nearly buckling under the strain.

This growth is more gradual but unlike COVID-19, where it spiked over two weeks and then plateaued at a new high, we're seeing continuous growth with no signs of slowing down or stopping.

About Cloudflare and its services
Company response

Cloudflare, which powers one-fifth of all websites, provides services to keep sites up and running, fast, and secure from attacks.

It offers a content delivery network, security and DDoS protections, and an "Always Online" technology that serves cached versions of websites when the main server fails or goes offline.

The company also gives businesses tools to block unwanted AI bot traffic.