Cloudflare CEO: By 2027, internet AI robot traffic will surpass human traffic

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said that robots are taking over the entire internet. In an interview at this week’s SXSW conference in Austin, he stated that with the rapid development of artificial intelligence, AI robot traffic will surpass human traffic on the internet by 2027.

Prince explained that as generative AI technology advances, network traffic generated by robots continues to rise because robots can access vast numbers of websites to find answers for user chatbots.

“If a human is doing something—like wanting to buy a digital camera—you might browse five websites. But the intelligent agents or robots serving you often visit 1,000 times more websites,” Prince said. “That means they might browse 5,000 websites. This is real traffic and will create real load pressure, which everyone must address and consider.”

Prince stated that before the era of generative AI, only about 20% of internet traffic came from robots, with Google’s web crawlers being the largest. One-fifth of the world’s websites use services from his company’s network infrastructure and security firm. However, aside from some legitimate crawlers, most other robots are exploited by scammers and malicious actors.

“As generative AI rises and demands nearly unlimited data, we see robot traffic continuing to grow. We expect that by 2027, internet robot traffic will surpass human traffic,” Prince said.

The executive also pointed out that this change in the internet will lead to the development of new technologies, such as sandbox environments that can quickly be set up for AI intelligent agents and destroyed after task completion. These technologies can be useful when users ask AI agents to handle specific tasks like planning trips.

“We are thinking about how to truly build the underlying infrastructure so that people can launch new code as easily as opening a new tab in a browser, enabling it to run and serve various intelligent agents,” Prince said.