Cloudflare CEO warns bot traffic may surpass human internet use by 2027

Bots are rapidly reshaping the internet, according to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince. Speaking at the SXSW conference in Austin this week, he said that as artificial intelligence continues to evolve rapidly, AI-driven bot traffic could outpace human internet usage as early as 2027.

Prince explained that the surge in bot activity is closely tied to the growth of generative AI. Bots can visit significantly more websites than humans to gather information and generate responses for users.

“If a human were doing a task — let’s say you were shopping for a digital camera — and you might go to five websites. Your agent or the bot that’s doing that will often go to 1,000 times the number of sites that an actual human would visit,” Prince said. “So it might go to 5,000 sites. And that’s real traffic, and that’s real load, which everyone is having to deal with and take into account.”

Before the rise of generative AI, bots accounted for roughly 20% of total internet traffic, with Google’s web crawler being the most prominent, according to Prince. Aside from a handful of legitimate crawlers, most other bots were associated with scams or malicious activity.

“With the rise of generative AI, and its just insatiable need for data, we’re seeing a rise where we suspect that, in 2027, the amount of bot traffic online will exceed the amount of human traffic that’s online,” Prince said.

He also noted that this shift will require entirely new types of infrastructure. One idea involves creating temporary “sandboxes” for AI agents — isolated environments that can be quickly launched to complete tasks and then shut down afterwards. These environments could be useful when users rely on AI to perform tasks such as planning a trip or researching products.

“What we’re trying to think about is, how do we actually build that underlying infrastructure where you can — as easily as you open a new tab in your browser — you can actually spin up new code, which can then run and service the agents that are out there,” Prince said.

He suggested that, in the future, millions of these sandbox environments could be created every second to support AI-driven activity.

Such a surge in automated traffic would place heavy demands on physical infrastructure, including data centres and servers. Prince pointed to the COVID-19 period as an example, when internet usage surged dramatically due to increased reliance on streaming platforms like YouTube, Disney, and Netflix, pushing parts of the internet close to capacity.

“This [growth] is more gradual, but unlike COVID, where it spiked over two weeks and then it kind of plateaued at the new high, we’re seeing internet traffic grow and grow and grow, and we don’t see anything that’s going to slow it down or stop it,” Prince added.

These challenges highlight the growing importance of companies like Cloudflare, which provide services that help websites remain accessible, fast, and secure. Its offerings include content delivery networks, DDoS protection, security tools, and features such as “Always Online,” which keeps cached versions of websites accessible even if the main servers go down. The company also provides tools that help businesses manage or block unwanted AI bot traffic.

With its global reach, Cloudflare has a unique vantage point on how the internet is evolving and the pressures created by the rise of generative AI.

“I think the thing that people don’t appreciate about AI is it’s a platform shift,” Prince said, referencing earlier transformations such as the transition from desktop computing to mobile. “AI is another platform shift … the way that you’re going to consume information is completely different.”