Bot web traffic has overtaken human web traffic, data shows

Artificial intelligenceBot web traffic has overtaken human web traffic, data showsCloudflare says that 57.4% of requests to a selection of websites it hosts are now automated bot requests, while 42.6% are human-generated web requests. Listen to this article with a free account00:0000:00Bot web traffic online has overtaken human web traffic according to Cloudflare.John Lund / Getty ImagesShareAdd NBC News to GoogleJune 4, 2026, 6:27 PM EDTBy Samantha ElkinsTraffic to websites from AI agents and bots has eclipsed human-generated web traffic for the first time, marking a landmark in AI’s progress and impact earlier than expected, according to one of the largest internet hosting services, Cloudflare. Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.“Welp, that happened faster than I predicted. Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027, but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet’s history,” Matthew Prince, Co-founder & CEO of Cloudflare, wrote in a Thursday X post, linking to Cloudflare’s traffic analysis webpage.The rise is attributed to the continued growth of AI agents, largely autonomous programs that use tools that collaborate with high-level programs and data, with little human feedback.Cloudflare’s website, which has a feature to display bot versus human-generated search requests, says that 57.4% of requests are now automated bot requests compared to 42.6% human generated internet requests, based on a sample of traffic to websites it hosts. Humans might browse five websites before making a purchase, however, an AI service might browse 5,000 websites. This increase in search requests explains how online bot traffic jumped to over 55%, surpassing human-generated traffic.The exact day the AI agents and bots surpassed human activity remains unclear. In response to a comment under his X post, Prince wrote that the data is “a bit messy (so...