Cloudflare’s Prince tells The Verge bots could be 1,000x human traffic

Bots could make up 1,000 times more web traffic than humans within five years, Cloudflare chief executive Matthew Prince told The Verge. He made the forecast on Nilay Patel’s Decoder podcast. He added that each of his earlier predictions on bot traffic had been wrong.

They were wrong because bots grew faster than he expected. At Web Summit last November, Prince said automated traffic would pass human traffic in the second half of 2027. By March, Cloudflare’s data pointed to the first half of 2027. In May, his team told him it had already happened.

“Five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be 1,000 times human traffic online,” Prince said.

Human traffic will stay roughly flat, he said. The growth comes from AI scrapers and agents. Cloudflare sits in front of more than 20% of the web.

Charging the bots

For about 30 years, the...

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