Bot web traffic has overtaken human web traffic, data shows

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Humans might browse five websites before making a purchase, while an AI service might browse 5,000.John Lund / Getty Images

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June 4, 2026, 6:27 PM EDT<br>By Samantha Elkins

Website traffic from AI agents and bots has eclipsed its human-generated counterpart for the first time, according to Cloudflare, an earlier-than-expected milestone that speaks to AI’s rapid advance and impact.<br>Subscribe to read this story ad-free<br>Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.

“Welp, that happened faster than I predicted,” Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, one of the largest internet hosting services, wrote Thursday on X.

“Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027,” he continued, “but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet’s history.”<br>The rise is attributed to the continued proliferation of AI agents, largely autonomous programs that use tools that collaborate with high-level programs and data, with little human feedback.<br>Cloudflare, which has a feature to display bot versus human-generated search requests, says 57.4% of requests are now initiated by bots, compared with 42.6% coming from humans.<br>Humans might browse five websites before making a purchase, however, while an AI service might browse 5,000 websites.

The exact day the AI agents and bots surpassed human activity remains unclear. In response to a comment under his X post, Prince wrote that the data is “a bit messy (so charts are too). But clearly on the other side now.”<br>In an interview with NBC News, Prince said he remains “stunned by the rate of growth” of nonhuman traffic online and explained that the increasing rate of bot traffic could have widespread implications.<br>“The web actually shrank” from 2015 to 2025, he said. The Pew Research Center backed this fact in a report that says that 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible a decade later due to deleted websites and inactive links.

The flip started in the last six months, he said, “and we’ve seen now just exponential growth of the web, and really interesting, creative things, and that again is being powered by AI.”<br>In response to the news, some commenters have brought up the “dead internet theory,” which holds that due to the rise of AI, the internet will one day largely be composed of bots interacting with one another, and humans and their content will largely be rendered irrelevant. Prince said he thinks the growing capabilities of AI actually are proving the theory wrong.<br>“I think a lot of people kind of have said, ‘Well, this has proved sort of the dead internet theory.’ I think that’s actually kind of wrong at a lot, a lot of levels,” he said. “You don’t need to be a web designer, you don’t need to know how to program, in order to create these things anymore. It’s given access to content creation to a much broader audience.”

The rise in bot traffic also raises questions about how the internet’s business model will operate in the future, Prince said, because “bots don’t click on ads.”<br>Prince noted that one way to reconstruct the internet business model may be charging bots for access to digital users’ content. If implemented effectively and correctly, he said, “we actually might be on the cusp of the golden age of the internet.”<br>This model could make the web free for the humans again, Prince said. “I think that’s actually kind of an idealistic outcome that we’re trying to figure out if we can help catalyze,” he said.

Share<br>Add NBC News to Google<br>Samantha Elkins<br>Samantha Elkins is an intern on NBC News Digital's Technology team.

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