Cloudflare Says Bot Traffic Surpasses Humans for the First Time; CEO Discusses the Internet's Business Model in the AI Era
Cloudflare Says Bot Traffic Surpasses Humans for the First Time; CEO Discusses the Internet's Business Model in the AI Era
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said on the September 26 episode of The Verge's Decoder podcast that in June of this year the company observed bot traffic accounting for more than half of total internet traffic, and that this share is still rising. As AI companies scrape web pages at scale and AI agents perform online actions on behalf of users, Cloudflare—positioned as an intermediary between websites and agents—is offering site owners three options: block AI tools entirely, allow them fully, or permit only AI access from those willing to pay for content. In the interview, Prince discussed the impact of this shift on the internet's business model and how Cloudflare is redefining the relationship between websites and automated traffic for the AI era.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/podcast/1000344/cloudflare-matthew-prince-google-zero-ai-web-advertising
Provenance & status
- Byline
- OceanAlt Editorial
- First published
- 2026-09-28
- Last updated
- 2026-09-28
- Content type
- Newsflash
- Source material
- View original ↗
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