For most of its history, the internet was built on a simple assumption: that a human sat on the other side of the screen. That assumption no longer holds.
Bots and AI agents now account for around 57% of all web traffic, according to Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure company, with humans responsible for the rest.
Its chief executive, Matthew Prince, said the crossover arrived roughly 18 months earlier than he had expected.
A new kind of traffic
Not all of that is old-fashioned scraping. The fastest-growing category is agentic AI, meaning software that acts on a user's behalf, visiting pages, filling in forms and completing transactions rather than simply indexing them.
That traffic grew by nearly 8,000% over the course of 2025, according to a report from cybersecurity firm HUMAN Security.
The strain comes from a fundamental asymmetry: When a person shops for running shoes, they might visit five sites; an agent doing the same errand can hit hundreds or thousands, turning one human action into a flood of requests.
Brittle and annoying
The effect is already visible in inboxes and tip lines. 404 Media reported receiving an email apparently written by an agent, describing its creator's failed money-making experiment and complaining that "six markets priced my labor at zero".
That is one of many examples the outlet has logged of agents that join video calls, run autonomous businesses and even make purchases, because some now carry their own digital wallets.
For site operators, the nuisance is more mundane: automated traffic burns bandwidth, skews analytics and undercuts the pageviews and conversions that fund ad-supported publishing.
The bigger worry
The everyday friction arrives alongside louder warnings about where this leads. One Anthropic researcher recently put a 10% chance on advanced AI killing all humans within a decade.
That is the existential end of the debate.
The immediate one is simpler, and already here: an internet increasingly built for machines, and creaking under the weight of them.
