Human Internet traffic will be overtaken by bots next year, Cloudflare boss predicts: “We will consume information completely differently”

Matthew Prince, CEO of web services provider Cloudflare, says that bots are taking over the internet and that the way we get information will fundamentally change due to the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI), reports TechCrunch.

In an interview at this week's SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, he said that given the speed at which artificial intelligence is developing, traffic generated by AI bots will surpass human traffic online by 2027.

Prince explained that bots' use of the web has increased with the development of generative artificial intelligence technology, as bots are able to access many more sites to get answers to queries that users put to tools like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini.

“If a human were to do a task — say you want to buy a digital camera — you might go to five sites. Your agent or bot doing that will often go to 1,000 times more sites than a real human would visit,” Prince said. “So it could be up to 5,000 sites. And that's real traffic and real load that everybody has to deal with and take into account,” he pointed out.

By “agent” he referred in the present case to the so-called “AI agents” – artificial intelligence tools designed to solve head-to-tail different tasks, as autonomously as possible and with minimal human input.

Cloudflare boss says 'age of artificial intelligence' is already visible in web traffic

Prince also recalled that before what he called the “age of generative artificial intelligence,” about 20 percent of Internet traffic was bots, the largest being Google's web crawler. It automatically and systematically crawls the internet (especially the world wide web) to identify and index sites.

“With the rise of generative artificial intelligence and its virtually insatiable need for data, we are seeing growth that leads us to believe that by 2027, the volume of traffic generated by online bots will exceed the volume of human traffic online,” said Prince, whose company provides various services for 20% of the global Internet.

Cloudflare was a name little known to the general public until last November, when a major outage of its services affected numerous platforms and websites around the world, including Romania.

Its CEO also noted in the new interview that this internet shift we're witnessing now will require the development of new technologies to meet the demands of AI.

What software engineers see on the Internet doesn't even compare to the situation a few years ago

Using the internet by bots on this scale will require physical infrastructure in the form of data centers and servers.

Prince pointed out that during the COVID pandemic, internet traffic has grown so rapidly – ​​particularly among video streaming platforms like YouTube, Disney and Netflix – that some parts of the internet have come close to caving in under the pressure.

“This growth [de acum] it's more gradual, but unlike COVID, where there was a two-week spike and then it stabilized at a new high, we're seeing internet traffic go up and up and up, and we don't see anything slowing it down or stopping it,” Prince pointed out.

Matthew Prince says the way we'll end up consuming information will be 'completely different'

TechCrunch notes that all of these concerns about Internet congestion are a great selling point for Cloudflare, a company whose services focus on keeping websites highly available, loading them quickly, and protecting them from attacks.

But Cloudflare's scale actually gives it the advantage of being able to observe the Internet's continued evolution and the rapidly emerging challenges of artificial intelligence.

“I think what people don't fully understand about AI is that it's a platform shift,” Prince said, recalling past web platform shifts like the shift from desktop to mobile.

“AI is another platform shift… the way we will consume information will be completely different,” he pointed out.