Cloudflare Reports Over Half of Internet Traffic Now Comes From AI Agents

The Rise of AI Agent Traffic

Cloudflare has observed a rapid increase in internet traffic originating from AI agents. Daily requests from AI agents on their network surged by over 1,700% in the past year. This growth has led to a situation where, for the first time, more than half of all internet traffic is non-human.

The total HTTP requests handled by Cloudflare have nearly doubled, from an average of 63 million per second at the end of 2023 to 115 million per second currently, with peaks exceeding 150 million.

A Second Audience Emerges

This new traffic comes from 'agents,' software operating on behalf of people, distinct from traditional bots. These agents do not interact with ads or subscriptions, but they are typically associated with a human user's objective. For businesses, these agents can be additive if properly served, or extractive if not.

Impact on Website Economics

The traditional web model, where search engines drive human traffic that converts into revenue through ads or subscriptions, is being disrupted. AI answer engines now summarize content directly, consuming website bandwidth without directing human visitors to the site. This results in increased costs for websites due to automated requests, while revenue per request declines.

Categories such as Retail, Computer Software, IT & Services, and Financial Services have experienced human traffic declines of up to 40% in under a year due to this shift.

Addressing the Challenge

The increased automated traffic, which often carries no referral or ad impression value, leads to a situation where revenue per request is falling while operational costs for bandwidth, compute, and origin capacity are rising. Cloudflare previously recommended blocking AI training crawlers on new domains to allow site owners control over content usage for model building.