Bot traffic set to surpass human traffic on the internet by 2027
Jakarta (ANTARA) - Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has stated that bot traffic will surpass traffic directly generated by humans on the internet by 2027.
As reported by TechCrunch on Thursday (19/3), Prince expressed this view at the SXSW conference in Austin this week, noting that bot dominance on the internet could emerge due to the rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI).
Prince explained that bot usage of the web has increased alongside the development of generative AI technology, as bots can visit more sites to obtain answers to chatbot users’ questions.
“If a human performs a task—for example, shopping for a digital camera—you might visit five websites. Your agent or bot doing that will often visit 1,000 times more sites than a human actually would,” Prince said.
He further stated, “So it might visit 5,000 sites. And that’s real traffic, and it’s a real load that everyone has to handle and account for.”
Prince revealed that before the era of generative AI, only about 20 percent of internet traffic came from bots, with the largest contributors being from Google.
Beyond those bots, internet bot traffic is also contributed by bots owned by scammers and criminals.
“With the rise of generative AI and its insatiable need for data, we’re seeing an increase where we suspect that by 2027, the amount of online bot traffic will exceed the amount of human online traffic,” Prince said.
With this shift in internet traffic, Prince believes new technologies are needed, such as sandboxes for AI agents that can be activated instantly and then stopped after the task is completed.
This technology could be used when consumers ask AI agents to perform specific tasks on their behalf, such as planning a holiday.
Of course, bot usage of the internet on this scale will require physical infrastructure in the form of data centres and servers.
As the leader of a company that also provides internet infrastructure, Prince sees his services as a solution to handling unwanted AI bot traffic.
Cloudflare’s global scale gives it the advantage of being able to observe the ongoing evolution of the internet and the challenges that emerge rapidly in the generative AI era.
He then emphasised that the shift in internet traffic is inevitable. This is similar to how humans previously shifted from accessing the internet initially relying on personal computers (PCs) to the dominance of smartphones.
“AI is another platform shift… the way you consume information will be completely different,” he said.