Bots are taking over the web, according to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince. In an interview at the SXSW conference in Austin this week, he said that the speed at which artificial intelligence is growing will result in AI bot traffic exceeding human traffic online by 2027.
Prince explained that bots’ web usage is increasing with the growth of generative AI technology, as bots can access far more sites to get answers to users’ chatbot queries.
“If a human is performing a task, say buying a digital camera, they may visit five websites. The agent or bot performing it will often visit 1,000 times more sites than an actual human,” Prince said. “So it could be sent to 5,000 sites. That’s real traffic, that’s real load, and everyone has to deal with this and take it into consideration.”
According to Prince, before the era of generative AI, bot traffic on the internet was only about 20%, with Google’s web crawler being the largest. Prince’s infrastructure and security company is used by one in five of all websites. However, apart from other reputable crawlers, the only other bots were those used by scammers and malicious actors.
“With the rise of generative AI and its insatiable demand for data, we are seeing such growth that we suspect the amount of online bot traffic will exceed the amount of human online traffic by 2027,” Prince said.
The executive also noted that this change to the web will require the development of new technologies, such as sandboxes for AI agents that can be launched on the fly and destroyed when their tasks are finished. These could come into play when a consumer asks an AI agent to perform a specific task on their behalf, such as planning a vacation.
“What we’re trying to think about is how do we actually build that underlying infrastructure so that as easily as opening a new tab in a browser, we can actually launch new code and run the agents there to provide services,” Prince said.
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He envisions a time soon when millions of these “sandboxes” for agents will be created every second.
Of course, for bots to use the internet at this scale, they will need physical infrastructure in the form of data centers and servers. Prince noted that internet traffic has increased rapidly during the coronavirus outbreak, especially among video streamers such as YouTube, Disney, and Netflix, so much so that parts of the internet are on the verge of buckling under the strain.
“This (growth) is more gradual, but unlike COVID-19, which spiked in two weeks and then plateaued at a high, internet traffic is increasing more and more and we don’t see anything slowing it down or stopping it,” Prince added.
All of these concerns about overload are good marketing for Cloudflare, a company focused on services that help websites stay highly available, load quickly, and stay safe from attacks. Its products include a content delivery network, a suite of security and DDoS protections, and “always online” technology that provides a cached version of a website when the main server fails or goes offline. It also provides tools for businesses to block unwanted AI bot traffic.
Still, Cloudflare’s scale gives it the advantage of seeing the ongoing evolution of the Internet and the rapidly emerging challenges it faces in the generative AI era.
“I think what people don’t understand about AI is that it’s a platform transition,” Prince said, recalling the web’s early platform transitions, such as the transition from desktop to mobile. “AI is another platform change. It’s a completely different way of consuming information.”
