BOT’S GOING ON?

Humans Are Outnumbered Online for the First Time

The milestone has arrived years ahead of schedule.

For the first time in the internet’s history, machines now do more of the web’s browsing than the people who built it. Bots and AI agents account for 57.4 percent of all online requests, against 42.6 percent from humans, according to figures from internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare. The crossover is driven by the explosion of AI agents—near-autonomous programs that roam the web with barely any human input. A person might check five sites before buying something, while an agent might tear through 5,000. Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince, 51, didn’t see it coming this fast. “Welp, that happened faster than I predicted,” he wrote on X, having earlier pegged the tipping point at late 2027. He told NBC News he remains amazed by how quickly nonhuman traffic is climbing and that the shift only really kicked in over the past six months. The numbers have revived the so-called “dead internet theory”—the idea that the web will end up as bots talking to bots while humans fade into irrelevance. Prince thinks that’s wrong, arguing AI has handed content creation to people who can’t code or design. The bigger headache, he said, is money, because “bots don’t click on ads”—though he floated charging them for access instead, which could leave the web free for actual humans again.