Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince believes bots are on track to dominate internet traffic. Speaking in an interview at the SXSW conference in Austin this week, he said that, given the rapid growth of artificial intelligence, AI bot traffic could exceed human-generated traffic online by 2027.
Prince explained that bot activity has surged alongside advances in generative AI, as these systems are capable of visiting far more websites to gather information for user queries than humans typically would.
“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.”
READ: Cloudflare CEO apologizes after global outage took down parts of the internet (
Providing context, Prince noted that before the generative AI boom, bots accounted for roughly 20% of internet traffic, with Google’s web crawler being the most prominent example. Beyond a handful of legitimate crawlers, much of the remaining bot activity came from scammers and other malicious actors.
“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. He added that this shift will require new types of infrastructure, including sandboxed environments for AI agents that can be created and shut down dynamically as they complete tasks—such as planning trips or conducting research on behalf of users.
Expanding on this idea, Prince said the goal is to make such systems as seamless as everyday browsing. “What we’re trying to think about is, how do we actually build that underlying infrastructure where you can — as easily as you open a new tab in your browser — you can actually spin up new code, which can then run and service the agents that are out there,” he said.
However, the rapid rise in bot-driven activity also raises questions about the physical infrastructure needed to support it. Prince pointed out that during the COVID-19 pandemic, internet usage spiked dramatically, particularly due to video streaming platforms like YouTube, Disney, and Netflix, pushing parts of the internet close to capacity.
READ: Cloudflare outage disrupts major sites including X, ChatGPT and more (
“This [growth] is more gradual, but unlike COVID, where it spiked over two weeks and then it kind of plateaued at the new high, we’re seeing internet traffic grow and grow and grow, and we don’t see anything that’s going to slow it down or stop it,” Prince added.
At the same time, a TechCrunch report noted that such concerns about rising traffic also align with Cloudflare’s business, which focuses on helping websites remain accessible under heavy load. Still, the company’s scale provides it with a unique vantage point to observe how the internet is evolving and the challenges emerging in the generative AI era.
“I think the thing that people don’t appreciate about AI is it’s a platform shift,” Prince said, comparing it to earlier transitions such as the move from desktop computing to mobile. “AI is another platform shift … the way that you’re going to consume information is completely different.”