Dead Internet Theory May Be Real as Bots Overtake Humans in Web Page Requests
Aleksandr Manin
Cloudflare's latest traffic snapshot puts automated requests at 57.5% of page hits across its network, compared with 42.5% from people, giving fresh weight to the Dead Internet Theory. The company says that figure marks the first time bots have outpaced human users in its data.
The company says those figures cover only HTTP requests to web pages that pass through Cloudflare, not all internet traffic. Matthew Prince, Cloudflare cofounder and CEO, said the change arrived earlier than he expected — he had previously predicted that bots would pass humans only in 2027.
This happened faster than I predicted.
Cloudflare links the rise in automated traffic to AI agents and services that browse sites on their own, collect information, compare products, index content, and handle other tasks without human involvement. The company says AI crawlers can generate from hundreds to tens of thousands of requests for a single visit, which sharply changes the scale of automated activity.
On July 1, Cloudflare announced Monetization Gateway, a system that would let site owners charge for pages, datasets, API calls, or tool requests. The company says it works through HTTP 402, with the server returning price and payment details first, then the agent repeating the request with confirmation.
Cloudflare frames the idea as a new way to pay for web resources when machines are doing the browsing instead of people. If requests become transactions, does that change how the open web should work?
