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Bots are taking over the web, according to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince. In an interview<\/a> at the SXSW conference in Austin this week, he said that with the speed at which artificial intelligence is growing, AI bot traffic will exceed the amount of human traffic that\u2019s online by 2027.<\/p>\n Prince explained that bots\u2019 web usage has been increasing alongside the growth of generative AI technology because bots are capable of visiting far more sites to get answers for users\u2019 chatbot queries.<\/p>\n \u201cIf a human were doing a task \u2014 let\u2019s say you were shopping for a digital camera \u2014 and you might go to five websites. Your agent or the bot that\u2019s doing that will often go to 1,000 times the number of sites that an actual human would visit,\u201d Prince said. \u201cSo it might go to 5,000 sites. And that\u2019s real traffic, and that\u2019s real load, which everyone is having to deal with and take into account.\u201d<\/p>\n Before the generative AI era, the internet was only about 20% bot traffic, with Google\u2019s web crawler being the largest, according to Prince, whose infrastructure and security company<\/a> is used by one-fifth of all websites. But beyond some other reputable crawlers, the only other bots were those used by scammers and bad actors.<\/p>\n \u201cWith the rise of generative AI, and its just insatiable need for data, we\u2019re seeing a rise where we suspect that, in 2027, the amount of bot traffic online will exceed the amount of human traffic that\u2019s online,\u201d Prince said. <\/p>\n The executive also noted that this change to the web would require the development of new technologies, like sandboxes for AI agents that can be spun up on the fly and then torn down when their task has finished. These could come into play when consumers ask AI agents to perform certain tasks on their behalf, like planning a vacation.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we\u2019re trying to think about is, how do we actually build that underlying infrastructure where you can \u2014 as easily as you open a new tab in your browser \u2014 you can actually spin up new code, which can then run and service the agents that are out there,\u201d Prince said.<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA<\/span> He imagines there will soon be a time when millions of these \u201csandboxes\u201d for agents would be created every second. <\/p>\n Of course, bots\u2019 use of the internet at this scale would require physical infrastructure in the form of data centers and servers. Prince pointed out that, during Covid, internet traffic increased so quickly, particularly among video streamers like YouTube, Disney, and Netflix, that some parts of the internet were nearly buckling under the strain.<\/p>\n \u201cThis [growth] is more gradual, but unlike Covid, where it spiked over two weeks and then it kind of plateaued at the new high, we\u2019re seeing internet traffic grow and grow and grow, and we don\u2019t see anything that\u2019s going to slow it down or stop it,\u201d Prince added. <\/p>\n All these concerns about overload are great marketing for Cloudflare, a company whose services focus on helping websites stay highly available, load quickly, and remain safe from attacks. Among its offerings is a content delivery network, a series of security and DDoS protections, and an \u201cAlways Online\u201d technology<\/a> that serves cached versions of websites when the main server fails or goes offline. It also provides businesses with tools to block the AI bot traffic they don\u2019t want<\/a>.<\/p>\n Still, Cloudflare\u2019s scale gives it the advantage of being able to view the internet\u2019s ongoing evolution and the quickly arising challenges facing the generative AI era.<\/p>\n \u201cI think the thing that people don\u2019t appreciate about AI is it\u2019s a platform shift,\u201d Prince said, recalling the web\u2019s earlier platform shifts, like the move from the desktop to mobile. \u201cAI is another platform shift\u2026the way that you\u2019re going to consume information is completely different.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n