Cloudflare CEO says AI bots now drive over half of internet traffic

Cloudflare’s traffic‑analysis platform Radar shows that artificial‑intelligence‑driven bots generated 57.3 % of all web traffic in the first half of 2026, surpassing human‑generated traffic for the first time. Cloudflare chief executive Matthew Prince announced the finding on X, noting the shift arrived about 18 months earlier than the company had projected (originally expected around 2027).

The data reveal strong regional differences: in North America bots account for 68.6 % of activity, while in many Asian, South American and Oceanian markets humans still lead. The surge is linked to advanced AI agents that crawl sites repeatedly on behalf of users. Although the metric excludes activities such as streaming and social‑media usage, publishers, e‑commerce platforms and other web‑based services face a new challenge because bot‑generated requests are largely low‑value compared with human visits.