Decoder with Nilay Patel · Saturday, September 26, 2026
Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, has observed a dramatic shift in internet traffic, with automated traffic, largely driven by AI, now surpassing human traffic. He projects that in five years, automated traffic could be a thousand times greater than human traffic.
“And and the challenge of that is, if you have, first of all, a thousand times more traffic, someone's going to pay for the infrastructure to power that. Like, that's going to require bandwidth, you know, that's going to require servers, that's going to require, you know, a lot of things in order to make that happen.”
“And the traditional model of how to pay for that, which was advertising, doesn't work for bots. Bots don't click on ads. They don't respond to, you know, pretty swirls of paint, uh, and and what we traditionally think of as a brand.”
“And so we've got to come up with something else that's going to power that, that that just insatiable demand that's going to be put on the internet going forward.”