Bots are taking over the web, according to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince. In one interview at the SXSW conference in Austin this week, he said that at the speed at which artificial intelligence is developing, AI bot traffic will surpass the volume of human traffic online by 2027.
Prince explained that web use of bots is growing alongside the development of genetic AI technology because bots can visit many more websites to get answers to users’ chatbot queries.
“If a human was performing a task — let’s say you were shopping for a digital camera — and you might go to five sites. Your agent or the robot doing that will often go to 1,000 times the number of sites that a real human would visit,” Prince said. “So it can go to 5,000 sites. And that’s real traffic, and that’s real load, which everybody has to deal with and take into account.”
Before the era of genetic artificial intelligence, the Internet accounted for only about 20% of bot traffic, with Google’s web crawler being the largest, according to Prince, whose infrastructure and security company used by one fifth of all websites. But aside from some other reliable crawlers, the only other bots were those used by fraudsters and bad actors.
“With the rise of genetic artificial intelligence and its insatiable need for data, we’re seeing a rise where we suspect that, in 2027, the volume of bot traffic online will exceed the volume of human traffic online,” Prince said.
The executive also noted that this change to the Web would require the development of new technologies, such as sandboxes for AI agents that can be rotated on the fly and then collapsed when their work is done. These could come into play when consumers ask AI agents to perform certain tasks on their behalf, such as vacation planning.
“What we’re trying to think about is how do we actually build this underlying infrastructure where you can — as easily as you open a new tab in your browser — you can actually create new code, which can then run and serve the agents that are out there,” Prince said.
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He imagines that there will soon come a time when millions of these “sandboxes” for agents would be created every second.
Of course, bots using the internet on this scale would require physical infrastructure in the form of data centers and servers. Prince pointed out that, during Covid, internet traffic has grown so rapidly, particularly among video streamers like YouTube, Disney and Netflix, that some parts of the internet are almost buckling under the strain.
“This [growth] it’s more gradual, but unlike COVID, where it spiked over two weeks and then hit a new high, we’re seeing Internet traffic grow and grow and grow, and we don’t see anything that’s going to slow it down or stop it,” Prince added.
All of these worries about overloading are great marketing for Cloudflare, a company whose services are focused on helping websites stay highly available, load quickly, and stay safe from attacks. Among its offerings are a content delivery network, a range of security and DDoS protections, and an “Always Online” technology which serves cached versions of websites when the primary server fails or goes offline. It also provides businesses with tools to block AI bot traffic they don’t want.
However, Cloudflare’s scale gives it the advantage of being able to see the Internet’s continued evolution and the rapid challenges facing the age of genetic artificial intelligence.
“I think what people don’t appreciate about AI is that it’s a platform shift,” Prince said, recalling the Web’s previous platform shifts, such as the move from desktop to mobile. “Artificial intelligence is another platform change… the way you’re going to consume information is completely different.”
