The rapid increase in agentic internet traffic means “bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet's history,” according to the CEO and co-founder of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince. “Welp, that happened faster than I predicted,” Prince awkwardly admitted, making his previous expectations of the crossover happening sometime in 2027 seem way off the mark.

Before going on, it’s important to differentiate this new surge in internet traffic from the traditional bots most will be aware of, things like website crawlers, search indexers, and bad stuff like fraud or abuse bots. It is different now, as Cloudflare is charting agents that browse the web much like humans on behalf of humans, and it is already at a massive scale.

You might wonder what all these AI agent bots are actually up to, particularly if you’re not running your own army of digital helpers. Thankfully, Cloudflare has addressed the scope of AI bot activity in previous articles and blogs. Also, last year it started classifying traffic according to these new website visitors (e.g., signed agents and verified bots), which is why the charts don’t go back very far.

Cloudflare reckons these AI agents are online doing stuff like reading product pages, checking prices, performing multi-step tasks online like comparing flights, scraping and indexing web content (but for AI models, not search engines), and acting as personal assistants to order food, compare and shop, and handle customer service interactions.

At the time of writing, Cloudflare data suggests that the balance between bot vs. human web traffic (HTTP requests) is already firmly favoring the former, split 57.5 vs. 42.5 percent. A major shift from humans clicking around, being the primary customers of the web, to AI agents doing these tasks has already happened. The rate of change has even taken Prince by surprise. In replies to the embedded Tweet, Prince also noted that the date of the human/bot crossover wasn’t clear as the “data [is] a bit messy.” Nevertheless, we are “clearly on the other side now,” he added.

However, Cloudflare metrics measure HTTP requests, not engagement. Flesh-and-blood folks remain the primary users of the web in terms of total time spent in app usage, streaming, and infinite-scrolling feeds. These mediums simply don't generate the same volume of rapid-fire page-load requests as automated agents do.

We were also interested in looking at Cloudflare’s breakdown of human/bot traffic by country. The most bot-ridden traffic comes from the tiny island of Gibraltar (92.1%), followed by Singapore (76.4%), then Iran (76.4%). While some of these places have a lot of data centers and hosting infrastructure compared to population size, Iran’s high bot count may rather come from the heavy use of VPNs with automated scraping and bypass tools. Cloudflare has also previously flagged Iran as a hotspot for malicious bot activity.

Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.

Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.