Cloudflare Chief Executive Officer Matthew Prince has warned that bots are rapidly reshaping internet traffic patterns and could surpass human activity online by 2027.

Speaking at the SXSW in Austin this week, Prince said the acceleration of artificial intelligence is driving a major shift in how the web is used.

He explained that AI-powered bots are increasingly responsible for internet activity as they crawl far more websites than humans in order to generate responses for chatbot queries.

According to him, this surge in automated traffic is being fueled by the rapid growth of generative AI systems.

“If a human were doing a task — let’s say you were shopping for a digital camera — and you might go to five websites. Your agent or the bot that’s doing that will often go to 1,000 times the number of sites that an actual human would visit,” Prince said. “So it might go to 5,000 sites. And that’s real traffic, and that’s real load, which everyone is having to deal with and take into account.”

Before the rise of generative AI, bots accounted for roughly 20 per cent of all internet traffic, according to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince.

He noted that Google’s web crawler was the dominant bot operating online during that period.

Prince, whose infrastructure and security company services about one-fifth of all websites globally, said that aside from a handful of legitimate crawlers, most other bots were associated with scams and malicious activity.

“With the rise of generative AI, and its just insatiable need for data, we’re seeing a rise where we suspect that, in 2027, the amount of bot traffic online will exceed the amount of human traffic that’s online,” Prince said.

Cloudflare Chief Executive Officer Matthew Prince has warned that bots are rapidly reshaping internet traffic patterns and could surpass human activity online by 2027.

Speaking at the SXSW in Austin this week, Prince said the acceleration of artificial intelligence is driving a major shift in how the web is used.

He explained that AI-powered bots are increasingly responsible for internet activity as they crawl far more websites than humans in order to generate responses for chatbot queries.

According to him, this surge in automated traffic is being fueled by the rapid growth of generative AI systems.

“If a human were doing a task — let’s say you were shopping for a digital camera — and you might go to five websites. Your agent or the bot that’s doing that will often go to 1,000 times the number of sites that an actual human would visit,” Prince said. “So it might go to 5,000 sites. And that’s real traffic, and that’s real load, which everyone is having to deal with and take into account.”

Before the rise of generative AI, bots accounted for roughly 20 per cent of all internet traffic, according to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince.

He noted that Google’s web crawler was the dominant bot operating online during that period.

Prince, whose infrastructure and security company services about one-fifth of all websites globally, said that aside from a handful of legitimate crawlers, most other bots were associated with scams and malicious activity.

“With the rise of generative AI, and its just insatiable need for data, we’re seeing a rise where we suspect that, in 2027, the amount of bot traffic online will exceed the amount of human traffic that’s online,” Prince said.