Bots now account for the majority of web traffic, Cloudflare data shows

Cloudflare reports that bots represent about 57 % of HTTP requests to HTML pages, while human users generate roughly 42 %. The figure, announced by CEO Matthew Prince, was expected to be reached by 2027 but arrived earlier. The surge includes not only traditional crawlers but also AI agents that read and process web content for assistants, summarisation and other automated tasks.

The predominance of non‑human traffic challenges the revenue model of many sites that rely on human‑generated ad impressions and clicks. In response, Cloudflare and partners such as GoDaddy are rolling out tools to help site owners detect, block or monetise bot access. The report also notes a rapid rise in AI‑generated content, with 44 % of new daily songs on Deezer and nearly half of online articles in 2025 produced by artificial intelligence, fueling concerns about a “dead internet” where much of the web is consumed by machines rather than people.