Internet bot traffic will surpass human traffic by 2027, Cloudflare CEO says

Bots are taking over the internet, according to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince. In a interview At the SXSW conference in Austin this week, he said that with the speed at which artificial intelligence is developing, AI bot cars will overtake the number of people on the Internet by 2027.

Prince explained that the use of bots on the Internet has been growing along with the development of AI technology because bots can visit more pages to find answers to users’ questions.

“If a person is doing a task – let’s say you’re buying a digital camera – and you can go to five sites. Your assistant or bot doing that is usually going to 1,000 times the number of sites that a real person would visit,” Prince said. “So it could go to 5,000 pages. And that’s the traffic, and that’s the real load, that everybody has to deal with and think about.”

Before the era of AI, the Internet was about 20% of traffic, while Google’s fire engine was the largest, according to Prince, whose foundation is his security. company it is used by one fifth of all pages. But beyond some popular bots, the only other bots were those used by criminals and criminals.

“With the increasing use of AI, and its insatiable need for data, we are seeing a rise where we suspect that, in 2027, the number of internet traffic will exceed the number of people online,” said Prince.

The official also noted that this transition to the Internet may require the development of new technologies, such as sandboxes for AI agents that can be blown on the fly and dropped when their work is done. This can happen when consumers ask AI assistants to perform certain tasks for them, such as vacation planning.

“What we’re trying to think about is, how can we build a foundation where you can – easily when you open a new tab on your browser – you can generate new code, that can run and serve the agents that are there,” Prince said.

He thinks that in the near future there will be a time when millions of these “sandboxes” will be created every second.

Of course, using the internet for bots at this level would require physical infrastructure such as data centers and servers. Prince also said that, during the Covid period, the number of people on the Internet grew so quickly, especially among broadcasters like YouTube, Disney, and Netflix, that some parts of the Internet were almost shaken.

“This (growth) is moving slowly, but unlike with COVID, where it grew for two weeks and then peaked, we’re seeing the number of people online growing and growing, and we don’t see anything that’s going to slow it down or stop it,” Prince added.

All of these concerns about overloading are big marketing efforts for Cloudflare, a company whose services are focused on helping websites stay available, load quickly, and be safe from attacks. Some of its offerings include a delivery network, a security suite and DDoS protection, and “Always Online” art which uses cached websites when the main server fails or is offline. It also provides businesses with the tools to do so record unwanted AI bot traffic.

However, Cloudflare’s growth provides an opportunity to observe the evolution of the Internet and the rapidly emerging challenges facing the AI ​​era.

“I think the thing that people don’t like about AI is the platform change,” Prince said, recalling the transition of a website, such as from desktop to mobile. “AI is another platform change … the way you use information is very different.”