Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says bots are on track to take over more of the internet than humans within the next two years.
Speaking at the SXSW conference in Austin, Prince said AI bot traffic could become larger than human web traffic by 2027. He explained that the growth is being driven by generative AI systems, which need to visit huge numbers of websites to respond to user questions and carry out tasks.
Prince gave the example of someone shopping online for a digital camera. A person might visit five websites before making a choice, but an AI agent doing the same task could visit thousands. He said that kind of activity creates real traffic and real strain for websites and internet infrastructure.
According to Prince, bot traffic made up around 20 percent of the internet before generative AI became popular. At that time, much of it came from trusted sources like Google’s web crawler, while the rest mainly came from scammers and malicious actors.
Now, he says, AI companies’ growing demand for data is pushing bot traffic higher at a much faster pace. Prince believes that by 2027, bots will account for more online traffic than humans.
He also said this shift will require new kinds of infrastructure. One idea Cloudflare is thinking about involves temporary sandboxes for AI agents that can be created instantly, used to complete a task, and then shut down. These could help support future AI assistants that handle actions like booking trips or planning vacations.
Prince said he could imagine a future where millions of these sandboxes are created every second.
He also warned that this growth will require major physical infrastructure, including more servers and data centers. He compared the current moment to the pressure the internet faced during the Covid pandemic, when online traffic from services like YouTube, Disney, and Netflix rose so quickly that parts of the internet were nearly overwhelmed.
But unlike that sudden spike, Prince said current internet growth is happening steadily and shows no signs of slowing down.
Cloudflare could benefit from this trend because its services are designed to help websites stay online, load faster, and defend against attacks. The company also offers tools that let businesses block unwanted AI bot traffic.
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Even so, Prince argued that Cloudflare’s size gives it a clear view of how the internet is changing. He described AI as a major platform shift, similar to the move from desktop computing to mobile, and said it will change how people access and consume information online.
