Bots now make up the majority of webpage requests worldwide for the first time, according to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince.
Prince posted on X that automated traffic now accounts for 57.3% of worldwide HTTP requests to HTML content, compared with 42.7% for humans, according to Cloudflare’s data.
Prince’s 2027 forecast arrived early. Prince predicted in March at SXSW that AI bots could outnumber humans on the web by 2027 as agent-driven browsing grew. He later revised that forecast to early 2027. Now, he says, agentic traffic is growing so quickly that bots have already crossed the line.
Why we care. Search is moving into an agentic era, where bots may become the primary source of webpage requests. That may increase the importance of making content machine-readable, authoritative, and easy for AI systems to interpret.
AI agents browse differently. Prince previously warned that AI agents can generate far more web activity than humans because they gather information differently. A person shopping online might visit five sites. An AI agent could visit thousands, creating real traffic and real server load without the same clicks, ad views, or customer relationships that websites have relied on.
The measurement problem. The shift creates a new challenge for publishers, retailers and brands: traffic may rise while human engagement, referrals and monetization do not.
The larger question. Prince previously asked what pays for the web when more of its “users” are bots? Now that bots have crossed the majority line, that question is no longer theoretical.
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