The Internet has a second audience

What happened

More than half the traffic reaching sites on Cloudflare is now automated, and AI agents (AI that carries out multi-step tasks rather than answering one question) are the fastest-growing part of it. For most of its history, the Internet had one audience that paid the bills: people.

Bots were always there, but they were mostly large, automated operations that didn't view ads, pay for anything, or read in any meaningful sense. At the end of 2024, Cloudflare handled an average of 63 million HTTP requests a second .

Today, it's almost doubled to 115 million, with peaks above 150 million. This year, for the first time, more than half of Internet traffic wasn't human.