Internet access from AI bots surpasses humans for the first time

“For the first time in history, there are more traffic from bots than humans on the Internet. Everything is happening faster than I thought,” said Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder of cybersecurity company Cloudflare, adding that he predicted this change would not happen until 2027. Specifically, the access rates of bots and humans are 57.5% and 42.5%, respectively.

According to Cloudflare, the generation of AI bots is completely different from traditional bots, which are only responsible for collecting search data, scanning websites or performing network attacks.

AI bots now work like real humans. They surf the web on behalf of their owners to perform complex tasks in a series, such as reading product information and comparing prices between e-commerce platforms, searching and comparing airline tickets and hotel rooms, ordering food, shopping online, acting as customer service processing assistants, and even scanning and analyzing content to train large artificial intelligence models.

“The Internet is dramatically shifting from a space where people directly click to an environment where AI robots do most of the work for us,” commented a Cloudflare representative.

Theo Tom’s HardwareCloudflare measures HTTP requests, not engagement. That means, the main users of the Internet are still humans in terms of total time spent. They spend time reading news, surfing social networks TikTok, Facebook, watching online videos on YouTube, Netflix, or using messaging applications. Meanwhile, the bot creates a continuous and continuous number of page download requests per second.

Cloudflare’s report also shows the regions with the highest bot traffic rates, led by the island of Gibraltar with 92.1% and Singapore with 76.4%. What these places have in common is that the density of data centers and storage infrastructure is large compared to the population size.

Cloudflare is a content delivery network (Content Delivery Network – CDN) that manages web traffic serving millions of websites and applications, processing an average of 81 million HTTP requests per second. A domain provider in Vietnam said Cloudflare’s services are popular globally and Vietnam is no exception, although there are no specific statistics.