Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said automated traffic has overtaken human traffic online, a shift he described as a turning point for the internet's business model. In a conversation with The Verge's Decoder podcast, Prince said the company's data showed bots passed human traffic in May 2026. He said Cloudflare found in June that bots made up more than half of internet traffic.
Prince traced the change through a series of earlier projections. He said that at Web Summit, he predicted automated traffic would surpass human traffic in the second half of 2027. By South by Southwest in March 2026, the estimate had moved to the first half of 2027, he said. He added that extrapolating the trend suggests automated traffic could be 1,000 times human traffic within five years, though he acknowledged his past predictions on the matter have been wrong.
Cloudflare sits between websites and the AI tools and agents that scrape or act on the web, giving site owners control over access. Prince said owners can block all such tools, allow them, or permit only those that pay for access. The company is trying to influence what the internet's future business model looks like, he said.
Prince said advertising has driven the web's growth for at least 30 years, with Google defining that ecosystem for the last 28 years through search, DoubleClick and Google Analytics. That model does not work for bots, he said, because bots do not click on ads or respond to branding. He said new payment schemes are needed to fund the bandwidth and servers that the surge in traffic will require.
The conversation also covered changes inside Cloudflare. Prince said the company laid off more than 1,000 people earlier this year, about 20 percent of its workforce. He then wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed headlined "How I choose which Cloudflare employees to replace with AI."
Prince described Cloudflare as a network operating in more than 350 cities with thousands of data centers. He said the company makes applications and content safe online, protects people and employees as they browse, and helps developers build applications that scale to an internet audience. He called that last business the fastest-growing part of the company. The interview was part of a two-part series on the future of business.
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