The traffic from botnets on the internet is expected to surpass the flow of people by 2027, says Cloudflare.

Brief on Matthew Prince’s statement (CEO of Cloudflare) at SXSW

At the conference in Austin, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince announced that bots, especially those using generative AI models, are already taking over the internet. According to his forecast, by 2027 the volume of traffic from such bots will exceed the data stream generated by humans if current technology development rates continue.

Why bots are growing
- Generative AI allows bots to quickly generate responses and search for needed information.
- When searching for a digital camera, people typically visit 5–10 sites on average.
- A bot can visit up to 5,000 pages – this is *real* traffic and load for infrastructure.

Current share of bot traffic
- Before generative AI appeared, bots accounted for no more than 20 % of total internet flow.
- The largest of them was the Google search crawler.
- Most others were used by attackers and fraudsters.

What to expect by 2027
Prince believes that thanks to the “insatiable” data appetite of generative AI, its traffic will continue to grow until it surpasses human flow. This means:

1. New bot‑management technologies – e.g., quickly created and deleted “sandboxes” for AI agents.
2. The ability to generate code and launch agents as easily as opening a new browser tab.
3. In the coming years, millions of such sandboxes could be created every second.

Physical infrastructure
- Growing bot traffic will require expansion of data centers.
- Prince compared current growth to the COVID‑19 pandemic: back then load spiked sharply over two weeks and stabilized at a new level. Now the increase is smoother but shows no signs of slowing.

AI as a new platform
> “AI changes how we consume information entirely,” says Prince.
He emphasizes that many people still do not realize how fundamentally the digital landscape will change with widespread AI adoption.

Conclusion: By 2027, generative‑AI bots could surpass humans in internet traffic volume. This will require new approaches to traffic management, infrastructure creation, and a rethinking of how we interact with the network.