Thomas Seifert, Cloudflare's chief financial officer, said that in the next five years, the volume of machine Internet traffic will exceed human traffic by about 1,000 times. According to him, the share of people in the total volume of transmitted data will decrease to the level of statistical error. At the same time, it is emphasized that the absolute indicators of human traffic are not decreasing; we are talking exclusively about the unprecedented growth rates of automated systems. Seifert was skeptical about his own forecasts, noting that the company had previously underestimated the speed of these changes. So, CEO Matthew Prince predicted a turning point for 2027 in 2025 and early 2026, but in fact machine traffic overtook human traffic already in May 2026.

The main reason for the accelerated traffic growth is the development of agent-based artificial intelligence. Unlike traditional search robots, modern AI agents mimic human behavior, but perform actions with machine speed and on an unlimited scale. A single user request can generate thousands of requests to various web resources. As an example, Prince cited the product selection process: if a person visits five online stores, an AI agent analyzes five thousand sites to compare prices and characteristics. Extrapolation of this model to millions of users using automated systems to search for information or analyze content explains the exponential growth in the volume of transmitted data.

Practical conclusions from this trend come down to the need to radically improve the efficiency of network infrastructure and review approaches to cybersecurity. For Cloudflare, this means an increased demand for traffic filtering and protection services in an environment where the vast majority of requests come from bots. This situation actualizes the theory of the "dead Internet", according to which the network is already largely filled with automated systems. For independent web resources, this poses a threat to the traditional advertising business model, as algorithms do not interact with banners. However, some analysts point out that current forecasts are based on the assumption of continuous growth of the AI market without taking into account possible market corrections.