Online Bot Traffic Will Exceed Human Traffic By 2027, Cloudflare CEO Says
- Reference: 0181051310
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/03/19/2144200/online-bot-traffic-will-exceed-human-traffic-by-2027-cloudflare-ceo-says
- Source link:
> Before the generative AI era, the internet was only about 20% bot traffic, with Google's web crawler being the largest, according to Prince, whose infrastructure and security company 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. "With the rise of generative AI, and its just insatiable need for data, we're seeing a rise where we suspect that, in 2027, the amount of bot traffic online will exceed the amount of human traffic that's online," Prince said.
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> 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. "What we're trying to think about is, how do we actually build that underlying infrastructure where you can -- as easily as you open a new tab in your browser -- you can actually spin up new code, which can then run and service the agents that are out there," Prince said. He imagines there will soon be a time when millions of these "sandboxes" for agents would be created every second.
"I think the thing that people don't appreciate about AI is it's a platform shift," Prince said. "AI is another platform shift ... the way that you're going to consume information is completely different."
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/19/online-bot-traffic-will-exceed-human-traffic-by-2027-cloudflare-ceo-says/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQL_97LxAPE
HELLO? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Online Bot Traffic Will Exceed Human Traffic By 2027, Cloudflare CEO Says"
WTF?
Bot traffic ALREADY exceeds human traffic by 2 to 1 at the very least.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, it's the definition of "traffic". Bots aren't watching streaming reality tv and garbage insta videos so by bandwidth the humans are "winning" for now.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure they are downloading videos, as many as possible.
Unless you think they will just leave free training data lying there, or have abandoned their video-generation aspirations.
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I was thinking the same thing.
But if anyone would know, Cloudflare would be the people to know. And they're the ones with vested interest to say that there are more bots rather than less, since they offer services to mitigate impacts of bots.
So this was a very positive statement in my view. I expected it to be much worse than it actually is.
if you really think about it..... (Score:1)
if you take things into account like arp queries, tcp states, icmp states, udp casts, routing protocol states, data redundancy,.... we've been there for a while.
By 2027??? (Score:4, Informative)
"Online Bot Traffic Will Exceed Human Traffic By 2027"
If you consider all kind of bots and search engines, this happened quite a while ago IMHO.
I host many websites, some with considerable real human traffic and my experience is that there is much more traffic that isn't human to the point I need to block some IP, use geo blocking and make custom mod_security rules at the reverse-proxy level to detect non-human traffic in order to not waste too much bandwidth and protect against attack bots and bots scanning for vulnerabilities.
The question is (Score:2)
When will bot traffic overload the system to the point where it collapses. Also, what are the AIs likely to do, when they start getting vast numbers of cannot connect messages.
email (Score:2)
I wonder if this threshold was ever surpassed when "electronic mail" was one of the main internet applications. I remember hearing that a large majority of emails were spam many years ago.
Meh. AI that AI Shit (Score:2)
robots.txt clearly ain't working. Turn their tools against them. Can an AI thingummy spot their usage pattern and block 'em? You are paying for their bandwidth/cpu to rip your content off ? Is there an AI shitheads IP list somewhere to subscribe to?
Redirect their traffic to something that spreads propaganda of your choice. Elvis is alive on the moon. Trump is orange satan. Elon musk eats babies. Marmite is the elixir of the GODS.
Re: (Score:2)
As far as I dealt with, 10+ years of anti-bot mitigation strategies. It's not hard to detect, its a matter of habing enough conditionals on filtering/traffic shaping capabilities that matter and those have limits at scale. Just because we can ID it doesn't mean we can target it without hurting normal users all the same.
Bam. Dead Internet theory no longer a theory (Score:2)
We laughed about it 10 years ago. Bot traffic has been rising consistently, soon to be 99%.
I doubt that is a good thing. It's out of control and I'm pretty sure it's pointless.
Re: (Score:2)
A site called botscout.com used to have graphs of bot vs human activity, and the numbers went up more and more and the graph line got steeper and steeper every month.
Eventually the graph just became a line going straight up, and a few months later they took the graphs offline. I guess there wasn't any point to them any more, eh? It's all fucking bots, all the way down.
We humans are paddling around aimlessly in an ocean of bots, drowning in their traffic.
Machines playing with machines (Score:2)
How long before they realize humans just aren't needed.
Not for all of us... (Score:2)
That there is more bot traffic may become true as some (many?) people will use "AI agents" to do things, but also some of us won't be using "AI agents". If enough people say "I don't want to use them" or "they don't work for me", then perhaps it won't be so bad the the concern is over-blown.
Internets value is less and less (Score:2)
As the non human traffic increases across the internet, it is becoming to diluted with AI bots. The companies are having to shoulder the burden of all the additional traffic. That means more servers to handle the AI bots.
From a user point of view, it seems the value of what I see is less and less. Kinda like broadcast TV. What I see there is less value to me because of more ads and more junk content. The internet is going the same way.
Terrible Situation (Score:4, Interesting)
So much wasted power.
So much wasted bandwidth.
So much wasted time.
All to generate and repeatedly process the same stuff poorly and inaccurately.
I hate to see it. But, I confess that I'm using the slop myself.
Re: (Score:2)
There is a huge amount of wasted power/bandwidth/time in AI, but the technology will improve: the first cars couldn't drive a mile, and now we have electric vehicles that go hundreds.
Also don't forget that humans "waste" resources too. If an AI makes a programmer even 20% more effective the real question isn't "is AI wasteful?" ... it's "who wastes more: six humans, or five humans and their AIs?"
Cars sucked and were horribly inefficient, but they got better, and reduced waste throughout society by enabling
Re: (Score:2)
> So much wasted power.
> So much wasted bandwidth.
> So much wasted time.
> All to generate and repeatedly process the same stuff poorly and inaccurately.
> I hate to see it. But, I confess that I'm using the slop myself.
So right. Came into this article to basically say this, but you said it better. What is described in the summary is ridiculously stupid and inefficient and broken as a model, and probably exactly what will happen.
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed.
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Probably only in total requests. It's not like bots are streaming Netflix.