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Bots and AI agents have overtaken humans as the largest source of internet traffic for the first time, according to data from U.S. internet infrastructure company Cloudflare.
Cloudflare's figures showed non-human traffic accounted for 57% of activity on its network in June 2026, compared with 43% generated by humans.
Chief Executive Officer Matthew Prince said on X that the crossover happened faster than he had anticipated. He had previously predicted non-human traffic would overtake human traffic by the end of 2027.
Cloudflare's own second-quarter 2026 earnings report, released Aug. 6, confirmed the trend at the company level, showing more than 50% of traffic across its global network came from machines rather than people.
The company's crawler data also showed 52% of crawler requests were for AI training as of June 2026, up from 22% in spring 2025, while pure search crawling made up a declining share of overall crawler activity.
Web crawling is an automated process where software programs called crawlers or bots scan and index website content. Search engines and AI companies use crawlers to gather data, and AI firms increasingly rely on this method to collect material for training language models.
AI agents can increasingly search websites, process information, and interact online at a scale far beyond human users. "An AI agent will quickly be able to read thousands of web pages and make many thousands of lookups before it comes back with the answer," Olav Lysne, a professor of computer science, told Norwegian public broadcaster NRK. "That's what has caused this to explode right now in recent times."
Cloudflare's figures do not offer a complete picture of global internet activity, as website visits are only one measure of traffic. Other companies have reported different figures; digital marketing firm BrightEdge, for instance, put AI-related traffic at 15%.
Lysne also noted that Cloudflare has a commercial interest in internet capacity. "It might be good to be aware of this," he said.
Publishers have described the broader shift as "Google Zero"—a decline in referral traffic as AI systems answer queries directly instead of directing users to source websites.
Separately, HUMAN Security's 2026 State of AI Traffic & Cyberthreat Benchmark Report found automated traffic growing eight times faster than human traffic, with AI-driven traffic up 187% between January and December 2025.
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