For the first time in history, automated traffic has surpassed human traffic. According to data from Cloudflare, whose infrastructure processes requests to millions of websites, bots accounted for nearly 58% of all web page visits in June. Meanwhile, Human Security reported that the activity of AI agents—capable of independently clicking links, filling out forms, and performing actions on behalf of users—has surged by almost 8,000% over the past year.
Other research confirms this trend. A report from Thales noted that as early as 2025, bots generated 53% of internet traffic, with around 40% of all online activity being malicious. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince had predicted earlier this year that bots would only overtake humans by the end of 2027, but the rapid proliferation of AI agents accelerated this shift by over a year.
The changes are already impacting major digital services. Stripe reports that about 70% of requests to its application programming interface (API) are now executed by software agents, while on the Alpaca platform, their share of all queries rose from under 10% to 30% in just one quarter.
Cloudflare has introduced a system called Precursor, which analyzes not individual user actions but the entire session on a website, as traditional methods like CAPTCHA are becoming increasingly ineffective at distinguishing humans from modern AI agents.
According to expert estimates, the true scale of these changes may be even greater: current detection systems mistakenly classify 7–15% of regular users as bots, while some AI agents go completely unnoticed. As a result, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla are already working on a new protocol called PACT, which will allow verifying visitor authenticity without confirming their identity.
These developments call into question the traditional internet model, which relies on advertising and analysis of real user behavior. Cloudflare has already announced that starting in September, AI crawlers—programs that automatically collect data from websites—will have to pay publishers for access to content or risk being denied access to pages. At the same time, according to PitchBook, only about 1% of the approximately $20 trillion in potential work that AI agents could perform in the future is currently being handled, pointing to continued growth in their activity.
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