Cloudflare says humans could become a "rounding error" as bots generate 1,000 times more internet traffic

[midian182]

Crystal ball: Just a couple of months after Cloudflare revealed that bots have officially surpassed human traffic online, the company has given its view on what things will look like in five years. It's not good news for us fleshy meatsacks: non-human traffic could be up to 1,000 times higher than human traffic.

CDN and cybersecurity giant Cloudflare held its Q2 earnings call on Thursday, during which chief financial officer Thomas Seifert gave a concerning prediction about what the web will look like in the future.

"If the current trends continue, we think in five years, non-human traffic will be as much as 1,000 times as much as human traffic," he said.

"In other words, humans will be a rounding error on the internet, not because human traffic goes down, but that's just how fast we're seeing non-human traffic grow."

Seifert did add the important caveat that his predictions have been wrong in the past. Cloudflare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince will likely be able to relate to this. He had predicted that bot traffic would surpass humans at the end of 2027, but it happened earlier this year.

Also read: The Zero Click Internet

It goes without saying that the sudden acceleration in non-human traffic is being driven by AI – agentic AI, specifically. Agentic systems behave very differently from traditional web crawlers and fraud bots. Their activity can closely resemble ordinary browsing, but it happens at machine speed and can be repeated on an enormous scale.

Even a straightforward prompt may trigger thousands of requests. Prince illustrated the difference using online shopping: someone searching for a camera might check five retailers, while an AI agent could examine 5,000 sites on their behalf. Multiply that behavior across millions of users asking assistants to compare products and airfares, research topics, collect information, or condense articles, and you can see why Seifert believes humanity's online presence will become a rounding error.

Seifert said that if traffic does grow the way he expects, "we've got to get a lot more efficient," which is where Cloudflare's services come in, of course. He also mentioned the security implications of a web made up pretty much entirely of bots.

The idea that Dead Internet Theory – the concept that the internet is mostly run by bots and AI – will be demonstrably true in a few years (or now, arguably) is a concerning one. For a start, it could see the end of independent sites that have relied on the web's business model since the 1990s.

There's also the fact that an internet full of bots, AI slop, and privacy risks is making more people pull away from the online world. In our poll, 97% of people said the internet today was a hellscape compared to its early days, and it looks like things are only going to get worse.

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Cloudflare says humans could become a "rounding error" as bots generate 1,000 times more internet traffic

 

[The Talking Tech]

If we are being replaced at our jobs, who cares if we get replaced online as well.

Corporations opened Pandora's Box.... there's no closing it back....unfortunately.

 

[ScottSoapbox]

What was a slow slide towards a dead internet has accelerated a hundredfold with AI.

Major online publishers are already considering delisting from Google (while Google writes checks to Reddit to keep access) which shows just how broken the old model has become.

And it’s only getting worse the next few years.

 

[NumberNine]

Sounds like a business culture problem to me. I've you're reading this and you don't have your own copy of everything you care about from the web, chop chop. Insulate yourself from this garbage.

 

[Anton Longshot]

I suspect that when people disappear from the Net most of it will be shut down.
AI bots don't buy stuff and care about zip.

 

[Tantor]

Human activity can never be just a rounding error. All internet traffic is inevitably for human benefit and has human origin.

"...someone searching for a camera might check five retailers, while an AI agent could examine 5,000 sites ON THEIR BEHALF..."

The Ai agent is searching on the behalf of humans.... not for itself.

 

[pnntmp]

If we are being replaced at our jobs, who cares if we get replaced online as well.

Corporations opened Pandora's Box.... there's no closing it back....unfortunately.

This is .. less than well though out, to put it mildly.
Someone who's not as polite as I am may even call it nonsensical (of course I'd never do that).

We are not "being replaced at our jobs".
The unemployment rates are flat for the last couple of years, and very close to all-time historical lows.

The jobs prophesied to disappear due to AI are in record demand.
Radiologists (assumed to be the first victim of AI by "experts") are in acute shortage. Job openings for software engineers increased by 15% compared to one year ago.

And, we are not being replaced online either.
Human traffic being surpassed does not mean it's being replaced, there's simply new, additional traffic.

 

[toooooot]

I watched a video from Nexus Gamers where they showed how they prevent data scrapping from their website. They inject their pages with gibberish to poison AI.
There should be a nonprofit organization dedicated to this cause supporting small to medium site owners
that generate their own data or entertainment. How long before we all can agree that the money those small site owners used to make is now taken by AI companies? It is theft in its most audacious form.

 

[Loadedaxe]

I think Cloudflare has a legitimate point here, but the “humans become a rounding error”...

Bots may eventually generate 1,000 times more raw internet traffic, but traffic volume isn’t the same thing as human relevance. One person asking an AI agent to research a product, trip, or topic could cause that agent to make hundreds or thousands of web requests on their behalf.

The bigger concern is what happens to the open web if AI agents consume all that information while humans stop visiting the sites that created it. Publishers still have to pay for writers, servers, and infrastructure, but they may lose the clicks, ads, and subscriptions that funded it.

I’m less convinced humans are becoming irrelevant. More likely, humans remain the reason the traffic exists while bots increasingly do the browsing for them.

 

[Loadedaxe]

I watched a video from Nexus Gamers where they showed how they prevent data scrapping from their website. They inject their pages with gibberish to poison AI.
There should be a nonprofit organization dedicated to this cause supporting small to medium site owners
that generate their own data or entertainment. How long before we all can agree that the money those small site owners used to make is now taken by AI companies? It is theft in its most audacious form.

I agree that small publishers deserve more control over how AI crawlers use their material, and there is a legitimate discussion to be had about licensing, attribution and bots ignoring access restrictions.

But calling all AI scraping “theft” is getting ahead of the facts. A bot accessing a publicly available webpage as humans do, does not automatically mean an AI company stole the revenue that site would otherwise have earned. That depends on what was copied, how it was used, whether restrictions were bypassed, and ultimately where the law lands on these cases. There are a few.

And poisoning your own pages with gibberish seems like a strange solution by Gamers Nexus. At some point you risk damaging your own search results, archives and readers just to inconvenience a crawler....
Newsflash, their content is not all that interesting, some of it is but ....

Protect the content, enforce crawler rules, 100%...negotiate licensing where appropriate...absolutely. Polluting the web to save the web? ...

 

[Vanderlinde]

No scraper is going to even close respect the things that you do or not apply. If you block one botnet a whole new level of botnets is already at the door to again, scrape, crawl, steal and train on your data without even getting something in return for it. Meta is the biggest culprit, and that is really one of the subnets that is blocked by default over at least 700 active zones in Cloudflare in my own account.

You can't stop it; other then market something for humans. Because no way I'm going to market something for bots.

 

[sdms96825]

Is it within the realm of possibility that as these bots develop they could block OUR access to the internet?

 

[nikosp]

Unfortunately behind accelerating bot internet traffic lies a far more significant issue. How on earth can anyone trust an agentic AI to process human activities on one's behalf that could end up with legal or economical implications, if something goes wrong for whatever reason? Just a simple everyday example: Imagine that for some unprecedented reason an AI agent sends the wrong amount of money for a payment or to the wrong bank or to the wrong bank account and while it will declare that transaction is OK, nothing is OK! When I make any kind of payment I double and triple check everything before and after the payment and I can rest assured only when the debt is officially erased, not a single moment earlier. And this is just a very simple example, imagine what can happen when AI agents act on the behalf of a business dealing with contracts etc. Imho, if less trust and space is given to these agents, bot traffic will be lowered and it is something that anyone of us can control. Unfortunately, this is against the will and the practice of the companies that are investing hundreds of billions for this purpose and surely they want their money back no matter how.

 

[TooQik]

My main concern is bandwidth. If too many Agentic AI bots flood the internet with traffic as the same time, there is the potential for traffic slow down, or even complete stoppage.

 

[Axeia]

I suspect that when people disappear from the Net most of it will be shut down.
AI bots don't buy stuff and care about zip.

The agentic approach they want to push on this will buy stuff for you just fine.
Problem is that in instead of just hitting up your favorite site or maybe a price comparison site it might visit a few thousand to find you a good price. Perhaps send a couple dozen of coupon requests to each as well to see if they work and find you the best price.

 

[Anton Longshot]

The agentic approach they want to push on this will buy stuff for you just fine.
Problem is that in instead of just hitting up your favorite site or maybe a price comparison site it might visit a few thousand to find you a good price. Perhaps send a couple dozen of coupon requests to each as well to see if they work and find you the best price.

Buy stuff for me? Of what money?
And even if I had money, let a bot spend it for me?
NEVER GONNA HAPPEN.
I insist on thinking for myself, making my own decisions, and living my own life.
I have seen people turn into AI drones and consider them morons.

Hehe "a few thousand comparison sites", that made me smile.

 

[Axeia]

Buy stuff for me? Of what money?
And even if I had money, let a bot spend it for me?
NEVER GONNA HAPPEN.
I insist on thinking for myself, making my own decisions, and living my own life.
I have seen people turn into AI drones and consider them morons.

Hehe "a few thousand comparison sites", that made me smile.

You will, I will.
Kids that have grown up with AI to answer all their questions will likely swallow it like cake as long as it's somewhat affordable. Why do anything (including thinking) when you don't need to.

It'll be people showing up at birthdays with a gift where they don't even know themselves what's in the box and what not. Bit like the ultra-rich cliché depicted in movies where the personal assistant takes cares of everything.
Just for a lot more people and the assistant won't be a human.