For the first time in the history of the web, writes NBC News, traffic generated by AI agents and bots has exceeded that produced by humans. A milestone reached earlier than expected, marking a historic turning point in the evolution of the internet.
Cloudflare, one of the largest hosting and security service providers in the world, released the data, and its co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince commented on it with a mix of astonishment and clarity: what many imagined could only happen in 2027 has materialized today.
This surpassing is not just a statistical curiosity, but raises profound questions about the future of the web, its economic models, and the very role of humans online.
The numbers behind the surpassing
According to Cloudflare’s measurements, which include a specific feature to distinguish bot traffic from human traffic, 57.4% of online requests now come from bots, compared to 42.6% generated by real people.
Prince admitted that the data is not perfectly clean and that the charts are a bit confusing, but the trend is unmistakable: we are clearly “on the other side.”
The data did not escape our Defense Minister Guido Crosetto, who posting on X a chart illustrating the ongoing trend, commented on Cloudflare’s findings: “For the first time in history, global Internet traffic generated by AI BOTS has surpassed human traffic. From today, the gap can only increase. Exponentially. We are entering unimaginably, and perhaps uncontrollably, fast scenarios.”
Prince confessed to being surprised by the speed of growth. He had predicted the turning point by the end of 2027, then anticipated it to the beginning of the same year, but reality outpaced every forecast.
The change has become especially evident in the last six months, with exponential growth in non-human traffic.
The nature of AI agents
These are not the simple crawlers or spiders of the past. The protagonists of this surpassing are AI agents: largely autonomous programs capable of using tools, collaborating with other high-level systems, and interacting with enormous amounts of data, with minimal or no human intervention.
The scale difference is impressive. A human user may visit five sites before completing a purchase; an AI service could analyze five thousand in the same amount of time.
This exploratory voracity is completely reshaping data flows on the network.
Shrinking and new expansion of the web
Prince recalled a little-known but significant phenomenon: between 2015 and 2025 the web actually shrank. Many sites disappeared, links became inactive.
Supporting this thesis, the Pew Research Center has documented that 38% of web pages existing in 2013 were no longer accessible ten years later.
In recent months, however, the trend has radically reversed. Thanks to the action of AI agents, we are witnessing a new exponential expansion of the web, populated by creative and interesting content.
It is precisely AI that is driving this rebirth, generating and indexing material at unprecedented speed.
The “dead internet theory” and why it is wrong
The news has inevitably reignited the debate on the so-called “dead internet theory,” according to which the web is destined to become a space populated almost exclusively by bots interacting with each other, with humans relegated to a marginal role.
Prince strongly disagrees with this view. According to him, AI is proving the opposite on many levels. It is no longer necessary to be web designers or programmers to create content and applications: AI tools are democratizing content creation, making it accessible to a much wider audience.
Instead of killing the internet, AI is making it more alive and inclusive.
Economic implications
One of the most concrete problems arising from this surpassing concerns the economic model on which much of the web is based: advertising.
Bots do not click on ads, thus they do not generate direct revenue for content producers. Prince emphasizes that this change will force a profound rethink of the economic functioning of the internet.
One of the most promising solutions could be to charge AI agents for access to digital users’ content. If implemented correctly and fairly, this approach could mark the beginning of a new era.
The hypothesis of a golden age for humans
The most suggestive idea proposed by Prince is that, by charging bots, the web could essentially become free again for humans. Revenues generated by AI traffic could support the infrastructure and content creators, freeing people from intrusive advertising.
This is, Prince admits, an idealistic outcome, but it is exactly what Cloudflare is working on to try to catalyze positive change.
After years of concerns about saturation and web quality, this surpassing could paradoxically pave the way for one of the richest and most creative phases in the history of the internet.
