Cloudflare CEO says automated traffic has passed humans and the ad-funded web can't pay for it

Bots are now the majority of the internet

Automated traffic has overtaken human traffic on the internet, and the advertising economy that has funded the web for roughly three decades cannot pay for what comes next. That is the case Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince made in an interview on The Verge's Decoder podcast published on September 26.

According to The Verge, Cloudflare measured in June that bots accounted for more than half of all internet traffic, a share the show said keeps climbing as AI companies scrape the web and as AI agents increasingly act on people's behalf. Prince told Decoder the tipping point actually arrived in May, when his team reported that automated traffic had passed human traffic for the first time.

A milestone that kept arriving early

Cloudflare's own forecasts repeatedly underestimated the pace of the shift. Prince said that when he was asked at Web Summit in November 2025 when non-human traffic would overtake humans, the company's data pointed to the second half of 2027. Asked the same question at South by Southwest in March 2026, the data had moved the crossover into the first half of 2027. A few months later, in May, his team told him it had already happened.

Extrapolating from current growth, Prince said Cloudflare expects automated traffic to reach 1,000 times human traffic within five years. That is not because human usage declines — Cloudflare expects it to hold roughly steady — but because machine traffic is growing so fast. He offered the projection with the caveat that every prediction he has made about the trend has so far been wrong, in each case because reality moved faster than the forecast.

Why advertising no longer pays the bills

Advertising has driven the web's business model for at least 30 years, Prince argued, and he credited Google above every other company for building it. Beyond search, Google assembled the surrounding commercial ecosystem by acquiring DoubleClick and building Google Analytics, and Prince described it as the central company of the internet's first generation.

That engine stalls when the visitors are machines. Bots do not click advertisements and do not respond to the brand marketing that monetizes human attention, yet someone still has to fund the bandwidth and servers needed to serve vastly more traffic. Prince said he is spending much of his time working out what should replace advertising as the internet's business model.

Cloudflare's seat at the gate

Cloudflare runs equipment in more than 350 cities across thousands of data centers, which gives it visibility into a large share of internet traffic and, increasingly, a gatekeeping role. Prince framed the company's broader mission as rebuilding the internet as if its importance had been understood from the start, and shaping its next business model is now part of that work.

As The Verge describes the arrangement, Cloudflare sits between websites and the AI tools that want their content, letting site owners block those tools outright, allow them freely, or admit only the ones willing to pay for access. The interview also explored which kinds of information may hold value as such payment schemes come into focus. The host pressed Prince directly on whether the outcomes he describes are actually good ones; in the episode's introduction, the host said the answer was still on his mind well after the conversation ended.

AI is remaking Cloudflare itself

The same forces are changing the company from within. According to The Verge, Cloudflare laid off more than a thousand people earlier this year, about 20 percent of the company, after which Prince wrote a Wall Street Journal opinion piece about how he decided which employees to replace with AI.

Why it matters

Cloudflare's numbers are not a statistic about one vendor's product. Its network carries enough of the internet that its traffic measurements function as an industry-wide signal, and that signal now says most activity online is automated and heading toward an overwhelming share. If content funded by ad-supported human readers is increasingly consumed by systems that generate no ad revenue, the economics of publishing change fundamentally. Prince's answer — charging AI systems for access, with Cloudflare positioned at the gate — would shift the web from an advertising model toward metered machine access and hand Cloudflare a central role in deciding who pays whom. Whether that preserves the web's economics or fragments them is exactly the question the interview raised, and it is one publishers, AI companies and regulators will all have reasons to care about.