For the first time, bots have surpassed humans in terms of global web traffic
For the first time in the history of the global internet, automated bots have officially surpassed human users in terms of internet traffic volume. The massive shift toward AI-based automation is occurring at a much faster pace than leading industry experts had predicted.
According to statistics from Cloudflare, which provides security and content delivery for approximately one in five websites worldwide, the current balance of power on the internet looks like this:
57.5% of all HTTP requests to HTML pages worldwide are currently generated by automated bots.
42.5% is the share of traffic attributable to real people.
The most striking figures are recorded in the United States, where bots already account for 71.5% of domestic web requests. This indicates the total integration of AI agents into the most technologically advanced markets.
Other large-scale studies also confirm the trend toward algorithmic dominance. In particular, the Imperva Bad Bot Report noted that automated traffic surpassed the 50% threshold for the first time in a decade, reaching 51% by the end of 2024. By the end of 2025, Cloudflare’s internal network recorded a ratio of HTML requests at 53% (bots) versus 47% (humans), and by the first half of 2026, the dominance of code had become undeniable.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince acknowledged that the pace of change had exceeded even his own optimistic forecasts. He had previously stated that bots would overtake humans closer to the end of 2027. Prince explained this unusual trend by the massive difference between the purchasing and search behavior of humans and digital AI assistants. For example, when an average person searches for a product, they visit an average of up to 5 websites, whereas an autonomous AI agent performing a similar task is capable of instantly monitoring and sending requests to up to 5,000 web resources. In 2025 alone, AI-driven traffic grew by a staggering 187%, which is nearly eight times the growth rate of human user activity.
Such total “robotization” of the web poses serious challenges and threats. First, of the total volume of automated traffic, only 14% comes from useful, legitimate crawlers (such as Google’s search bots), while 37% are classified as malicious (“bad bots”), created for cyberattacks, data theft, or spam. Second, online publishers, marketers, and advertisers find themselves in the midst of a deep analytics crisis, as traditional monitoring dashboards now reflect the behavior of algorithms and machines, completely distorting real human audience engagement metrics.
This is reported by the specialized publication Cyber Security News, citing data from the Cloudflare Radar analytics platform.
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