<nettime> Fwd: [Internet Policy] There are now more bots than humans on the internet.

[Adam Burns via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

there goes the neighbourhood.

.a

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: 	[Internet Policy] There are now more bots than humans on the 
internet.
Date: 	Tue, 9 Jun 2026 17:57:46 +0200
From: 	Carsten Schiefner via InternetPolicy 
<internetpolicy@elists.isoc.org>
Reply-To: 	Carsten Schiefner <carsten@schiefner.de>
To: 	internetpolicy@elists.isoc.org <internetpolicy@elists.isoc.org>



Dear all -

I consider this remarkable, e.g. in terms of a potentially coming change 
of money flows or why civil society would and/or should still be 
interested in Internet Governance when most stuff on the Internet is now 
of non-human origin.

Best,

    -C.

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: 	[ih] There are now more bots than humans on the internet. 
(Elias Al)
Date: 	Mon, 8 Jun 2026 11:45:12 -0700
From: 	the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via Internet-history 
<internet-history@elists.isoc.org>
Reply-To: 	the keyboard of geoff goodfellow <geoff@iconia.com>
To: 	Internet-history <internet-history@elists.isoc.org>



For the first time in history.

Cloudflare just confirmed it.

Bots and AI agents now generate more web traffic than humans for the first
time in internet history. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince described it as a
major turning point. Automated bot requests account for roughly 57% of
traffic to ordinary webpages worldwide, compared with about 43% generated
by humans.

And the CEO who announced it did not do so with a polished press release or
a prepared statement.

He posted four words on X on June 3, 2026: "Welp, that happened faster." [
https://x.com/eastdakota/status/2062212701414187452]

Here is the full context behind those four words.

Matthew Prince had previously forecast the bot-human crossover would occur
by the end of 2027. He revised that to early 2027. Then agentic AI traffic
grew so fast that the milestone arrived 18 months ahead of schedule in June
2026 catching even the CEO of the company tracking it by surprise.

Here is what drove this faster than anyone predicted.

The main driver is agentic AI, autonomous programs that browse the web on
behalf of assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini. Before the generative AI era,
bot traffic sat at around 20% of all web activity, with Google's web
crawler serving as the largest single source. It is now 57.5%.

20% to 57.5%. In under three years.

Here is the number that makes this even more alarming.

Cloudflare's 2026 Threat Intelligence Report found that bots now account
for 94% of all login attempts across its network, meaning only 6% of login
attempts come from actual humans trying to sign in.

94% of every login attempt on the web. Bots.

6% of every login attempt. Real people.

The infrastructure that was built to verify human identity is now
processing mostly machine traffic.

Here is the nuance worth understanding before the panic sets in.

While bots now dominate HTML request traffic reading pages, scraping
content, indexing sites humans still account for roughly 65% of total web
activity when the metric expands to include app usage, video streaming,
maps, and social media scrolling. Bots have overtaken humans in the
specific act of navigating and reading the web, but not in the broader
measure of people actually using the internet.

And here is the question nobody has answered yet but everyone is now asking.

Prince previously asked what pays for the web when more of its users are
bots. Now that bots have crossed the majority line, that question is no
longer theoretical.

The entire economic model of the internet was built on human attention.
Human clicks. Human eyeballs reading ads, buying products, subscribing to
services, and generating revenue for every website, publisher, and platform
online.

The advertising model depends on humans seeing ads. E-commerce depends on
humans making purchases. Subscription models depend on humans finding
value. Analytics depend on humans generating meaningful engagement signals.

The shift matters to anyone who publishes online, pays for hosting, or
relies on an AI assistant that quietly fetches pages on their behalf, the
economic assumptions the web was built on, advertising, referral clicks,
and human attention, are being rewritten in real time.

Sites can keep giving machines free access. Block them and lose referral
traffic. Or charge them and the infrastructure to charge them now exists.

None of those options are simple. None of them have been chosen at scale.
And the bots keep coming regardless.

Bot traffic has held between 53% and 60% in the weeks since the crossover.
Prince said the actual crossover occurred in the last few months, though
the data is messy enough that pinning down an exact date is difficult. We
are clearly on the other side now, he added.

Elon Musk replied to Prince's post with one word.

"Wow."

The internet was built for humans.

For the first time in its history most of it is not being used by them.

Source: Cloudflare · Matthew Prince · Search Engine Land · Tom's Hardware ·
TechTimes · June 3–5, 2026
https://x.com/iam_elias1/status/2063690208961314996


--
Geoff.Goodfellow@iconia.com
living as The Truth is True

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