Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince warns: Bots are taking over the web and we need to ...

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has said that bots powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are rapidly increasing their presence on the internet and could soon dominate online traffic.

Speaking at the SXSW conference, Prince warned that bot traffic may surpass human traffic by 2027. He said this shift is being driven by AI systems that browse far more websites than humans to complete tasks. Prince added that this growing load on the internet will require new infrastructure and systems to manage how bots operate and interact online.Prince said bots are now visiting far more websites than humans when completing tasks.

“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.”He said that before the rise of generative AI, bots made up about 20% of internet traffic, mostly from search engine crawlers and some 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 CEO calls need for new internet infrastructure

Prince said the increase in bot activity will require new systems to manage how AI agents operate online.“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.He added that in the future, millions of such systems, or “sandboxes,” could be created every second to handle AI-driven tasks.Prince also said internet traffic is continuing to grow steadily and there are no signs of it slowing down.“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,” he said.He described AI as a major shift in how people use the internet.“I think the thing that people don’t appreciate about AI is it’s a platform shift,” Prince said. “AI is another platform shift … the way that you’re going to consume information is completely different.”