AI bots may outnumber humans online by 2027, says Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, as generative AI agents dramatically increase web traffic and infrastructure demands.

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Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, speaking at SXSW, predicts that AI bot traffic will surpass human web traffic by 2027. He attributes this to AI agents visiting up to 1,000 times more websites than humans for a single task. Before generative AI, bots accounted for roughly 20% of internet traffic; that share is now growing rapidly. Prince also discussed the infrastructure implications, including the need for on-demand sandboxes for AI agents and the strain on data centers from continuously growing traffic — a trend he compares to, but says is more sustained than, the Covid-era internet surge.

Online bot traffic will exceed human traffic by 2027, Cloudflare CEO says

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