AI and bot internet activity outpaces human use for first time in history: ‘On the other side now’

The machines have risen.

Artificial intelligence and automated bots’ online activity has outpaced humans’ for the first time in history — with more than half of all internet traffic coming from automations instead of real people.

A shocking 57.4% of all web activity came from AI agents and bots — automated software that cycles internet tasks on repeat — compared to just 42.7% being driven by humans, as of at least May, data from internet hosting service Cloudflare revealed.

More than half of all internet activity isn’t coming from humans, shocking reports show. Bloomberg via Getty Images

Such bots spend much of their time interacting with each other, combing the web to answer human inquiries through AI platforms like ChatGPT, collecting personal data, or cycling through websites to boost traffic — and even performing mundane tasks like predictive text autofills on search engines.

And it appeared to be the recent proliferation of such AI platforms among human users that fueled the flip, with traffic generated from them spiking by 187% in 2025, according to a report from the cybersecurity group Human Security.

Traffic from automated AI programs for human users also rose by about 8,000% last year, CNBC reported.

Exactly what it all means for mere humans remains unclear, but Human Security CEO Stu Solomon doesn’t think people don’t need to worry about an AI apocalypse anytime soon.

“This notion of machine bad, human good just is not realistic,” Solomon told CNBC.

“You have to live in a world where machines are acting on our behalf, and we have to establish a level of trust that’s persistent over time.”

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince also thinks the internet’s advertisement-based business model could be jeopardized — telling NBC News “bots don’t click on ads” — but the flip could turn the internet into a place where people charge for access to their data, giving humans total control over their privacy.

“We actually might be on the cusp of the golden age of the internet,” Prince said. “I think that’s actually kind of an idealistic outcome that we’re trying to figure out if we can help catalyze.” 

It remains unclear exactly when the transformational switch to majority robot happened, but Prince believes it occurred sometime in the “last few months,” and added that we are “clearly on the other side now” in an X post.

Prince and other internet experts had predicted automated and AI systems would outpace human activity online within a few years, but the rapid rise even outpaced their best estimates.

“That happened faster than I predicted,” Prince wrote on X.

“Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027, but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet’s history.”