BenchmarkJune 4, 20261 min read
Bots Now Outnumber Humans Online: The Dawn of Pay-to-Crawl Internet
The internet has reached a critical milestone, with bot traffic surpassing human traffic for the first time, making up 57.4% of all HTTP requests worldwide. This shift is expected to fundamentally change the way websites operate and interact with automated agents, paving the way for a pay-to-crawl model.
Bot traffic now outpaces human traffic on the internet, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says, years ahead of his late 2027 forecast. He blames AI agents for the surge. His conclusion for the future of the web: "Clearly it's going to be pay to crawl." The article Cloudflare CEO says the web's future is "pay to crawl" as bots overtake human traffic appeared first on The Decoder.