Cloudflare reports AI agents now generate majority of internet traffic

Cloudflare chief executive Matthew Prince announced that AI‑driven agents accounted for 57.4 % of all HTTP requests measured by Cloudflare Radar, while human‑originated traffic fell to 42.6 %. The surge reflects "agentic" systems that browse the web on behalf of users interacting with AI chatbots such as ChatGPT or Gemini, often querying thousands of sites to craft a response.

Cloudflare data shows the volume of such user‑action crawling grew by more than 1 500 % in 2025. The company cites examples like OpenAI’s shopping tool, which lets ChatGPT search for products and place orders automatically. The shift has revived discussion of the "dead internet" theory, warning that increasing automated content could make it harder to distinguish genuine human‑generated information.

The metrics are based on HTTP request counts and do not measure user engagement time. Cloudflare notes that despite the rise in bot traffic, humans remain the primary users in terms of total time spent on apps, streaming, and scrolling feeds.