AI bot traffic will exceed human traffic by 2027, Cloudflare CEO says

At the SXSW conference in Austin, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said that, with the speed of generative AI, AI bot traffic will exceed human web traffic by 2027. He warned bots are visiting far more sites to answer chatbot queries. “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 generative AI era, the internet was only about 20% bot traffic, with Google’s web crawler the largest; beyond reputable crawlers, other bots were mainly used by scammers and bad actors.

Cloudflare’s infrastructure and security services are used by one-fifth of all websites.

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