Bangkok: Global internet traffic is now driven by bots and artificial intelligence (AI), surpassing humans by 57.4 percent of all website traffic, while human activity has dropped to just 42.6 percent.
According to Thai News Agency, recent data from Cloudflare Radar indicates that, based on HTTP requests, global internet traffic driven by bots and AI accounts for 57.4% of all website traffic. This figure is growing much faster than experts had predicted, originally expected to reach this level by the end of 2027. However, humans still dominate in terms of time spent on physical web pages, across streaming applications and social media.
This surge in numbers isn't due to web scrapers or traditional search engines, but rather to artificial intelligence (AI) agents that browse the web, search for information, compare prices, or book services on behalf of humans. Data from the Cybersecurity Institute indicates that AI agent traffic has grown by 7,851% year-on-year. North America, Europe, and Africa have a very high proportion of bot traffic, particularly in areas like Gibraltar, where bot traffic surges by 92.1% during peak hours, followed by Singapore and Iran. Asia, South America, and Oceania still see more human traffic, with humans accounting for 84.7% and 80.8% respectively in countries like Laos and Cuba.
Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, warned that business models relying on ad clicks will become increasingly difficult to sustain as AI extracts and summarizes content for users directly, without requiring them to click on the original ad website. Websites and infrastructure providers are beginning to shift their strategies to charging AI companies for access to train their models, which could become a new revenue model allowing humans to use websites for free.
The fact that over half of all internet traffic is from inanimate objects has resurfaced discussions about the Dead Internet Theory, which posits that the vast majority of the internet is controlled and created by agents and bots. This includes content on web pages, AI-written articles (which are said to make up over 50% of modern English-language articles), and posts and comments on social media.