Bot traffic now outpaces human traffic on the internet, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says, years ahead of his late 2027 forecast. He blames AI agents for the surge. His conclusion for the future of the web: "Clearly it's going to be pay to crawl."

Bot (automated) vs. human HTTP requests are split 57.5 vs. 42.5 percent, according to the firm’s latest data.

Prince said that while he had predicted bot traffic would surpass humans, he believed it would happen toward the end of 2027. Cloudflare Radar shows bots currently...