Cloudflare Radar data shows bots outpacing humans in web traffic

Cloudflare’s public Radar dashboard displays traffic that passes through its infrastructure. When the “Bot vs Human” graph is filtered to HTML pages only, bot traffic appears higher than human traffic, leading to viral social‑media claims that "bots have overtaken people" on the internet. However, the dashboard also offers a view that includes all content types—HTML, JSON, images, video, and API calls—where human activity dominates, driven by video streaming, social networking, gaming and video calls.

The discrepancy stems from the filters applied to the data. Cloudflare defines “bots” broadly, encompassing search engine crawlers, monitoring tools, API clients, scrapers, malicious traffic and newer AI crawlers used for model training. New graphs on the Radar site now show content‑type distribution and API traffic share, illustrating that much of today’s web traffic occurs via APIs and non‑HTML content. Consequently, while bots may dominate certain narrow slices of traffic, the overall internet usage remains human‑driven.