Who uses the Internet the most?

Girls, boys, the elderly, young people? You're all wrong! The Internet is now used most by bots. That’s yet another reason why we need to talk about KD (Artificial Stupidity) instead of AI (Artificial Intelligence), as we’ve already hinted at in our series on AI.

“Automated Bots Overtake Human Users in Global Internet Traffic for the First Time” is the current headline on the gbhackers.com website. According to statistics from Cloudflare, 57.5% of all HTTP requests on websites are now made by bots, while human requests account for only 42.5%. As early as 2025, the Imperva Bad Bot Report noted that automated traffic on the internet had already surpassed the 50% threshold in 2024. Cloudflare also reported that traffic from bots accounted for 53% compared to human traffic at 47%.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince had originally predicted that the shift wouldn't occur until 2027. He attributes the fact that it happened sooner to the behavior of AI tools. AI-generated traffic increased by 187% last year, growing eight times faster than traffic generated by humans. Of this, 37% of bot-generated traffic is classified as malicious. These are bots that scrape content, carry out DDoS attacks, and attempt to hack personal and financial data.

Instead of developing a joint human strategy — perhaps through the UN — to counter this and establish global rules for the use of AI (see article on AI manifestos), Cloudflare is taking the usual capitalist route. Cloudflare is starting to block AI crawlers and is introducing its first pay-to-crawl models for them. Will the bots then boost GDP growth for us?

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

Read more https://gbhackers.com/automated-bots-overtake-human-users-in-global-internet-traffic-for-the-first-time/

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