The Internet has a second audience

For most of its history, the Internet had one audience that paid the bills: people. We read the articles, saw the ads, and bought the subscriptions. Bots were always there, but they were mostly large, automated operations that didn't view ads, pay for anything, or read in any meaningful sense.

That's changing fast. At the end of 2024, Cloudflare handled an average of 63 million HTTP requests a second. Today, it's almost doubled to 115 million, with peaks above 150 million. Over the past year, daily requests from AI agents on our network grew by more than 1,700%. This year, for the first time, more than half of Internet traffic wasn't human.

The human web didn't shrink to make room. A second audience arrived alongside it: agents, software acting on behalf of people. They sit somewhere between humans and traditional bots. They don't respond to ads, but there's usually a person behind them with a job to get done. For businesses that learn to serve them and capture value from them, agents are additive. For those that don't, they're extractive.

What our customers need hasn't changed: to be discovered, to tell great stories, to build great experiences, and to sell. What's changed is that more than half your visitors are now software. Our job is to help you serve both audiences.

For thirty years, the web ran on one arrangement: you let search engines crawl your site, they sent you visitors, and you turned those visitors into a business. Being found and getting paid were the same thing.

AI has caused this delicate balance to break down. Now, answer engines read the page and give the reader a summary. This costs websites bandwidth without leading a human to a website where the ads or payments happen. The machines kept coming, and the audience that paid for the web stopped reaching those sites. Some of the most heavily crawled categories, like Retail, Computer Software, IT & Services, and Financial Services, have seen human traffic decline as much as 40% in less than one year.