Decoder with Nilay Patel · Saturday, September 26, 2026
Cloudflare has reported that automated traffic, largely driven by AI, has surpassed human traffic on the internet. CEO Matthew Prince noted that an initial prediction for this milestone was pushed up multiple times before the actual event occurred in May.
“Cloudflare found in June that bots now make up more than half of the internet traffic. A number that just keeps going up.”
“And so I was stunned when just a few months later, in May, team came to me and said, you won't believe it, but automated traffic has now passed human traffic online.”