The Internet has more artificial intelligence and bot traffic than actual human traffic, according to a new Cloudflare report published last week that seems to confirm the “Dead Internet Theory.”

According to Cloudflare's estimates, almost 60% of all Internet traffic worldwide is generated by automated scripts, including traditional crawlers, search indexers, malware bots, and now AI agents.

“Welp, that happened faster than I predicted,” said Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince, who admitted that he estimated that bots would become the majority of the Internet’s users by early 2027.

“Agentic traffic is growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet's history,” he said in an X/Twitter post announcing the report.

While bots are usually associated with automated scripts that perform repetitive actions such as posting on social media, increasing video views, creating fake stats on sites, or buying products online, many of the new agents actually browse the internet and perform more complex tasks.

The report also showed that the Internet under Iran's Islamic regime is composed of a majority of bots, with experts pointing out that this is most likely because of Iran’s hacking operations.

The current estimates place Iran’s network at between 75% and 80% bots, while less than a fifth of the total traffic is human.

When a user called out this report, saying that it's hard to believe a country like Iran, with almost 100 million people, has most of its internet traffic composed of bots, Prince said, “You wildly underestimate the scale and skill of the Iranian hacking efforts. Similar to North Korea.”

A mirrored situation can be seen in Israel, with current estimates placing bot traffic as low as 18%, and spikes of bot activity (most likely triggered by foreign hacking operations) flooding the network every couple of weeks.

The Dead Internet Theory, which emerged in online forums at the end of the 2010s and the beginning of the 2020s, posits that most online interactions are conducted by automated bots rather than humans.

This ranges from social media posts and video views to online product purchases, with the theory that there will be a moment when the Internet will be only bots talking to bots.

The latest report confirms that this theory might become reality much sooner than many estimates believe, now that humans are the minority of Internet operators.

Elon Musk reacted with interest to the news that bots had become the majority, while Prince said the actual “flip” from a human majority to a bot majority happened months ago.

“Data a bit messy (so charts are too). But clearly on the other side now,” said Prince when asked when the exact date was that this shift happened.