“Humans will be a rounding error on the internet,” according to a Cloudflare executive

Artificial intelligence is changing the internet at a speed that’s starting to be a little hard to imagine. Cloudflare has been measuring more traffic coming from machines than from people since May 2026 and according to Thomas Seifert, the company’s chief financial officer, the gap will grow. A lot. As reported by The Register, within five years machines could generate 1,000 times more traffic than us. Our activity would thus account for a tiny fraction of the network’s traffic, but what do these numbers represent?

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Machines already dominate the internet

While TIME.com already serves a version of its pages designed for AI bots and ChatGPT is changing how we reach the websites we used to consider go-to sources, the internet is rapidly adapting to AI readers, and the proportion is growing much faster than one might expect.

SEO techniques? They change. The format, tone, length, and content of articles and content? They change. The way companies present themselves on the internet? It changes. Outside the walled-off online spaces, such as social networks or certain services, the web is changing at an astonishing speed and it seems it’ll still have to change much more.

For Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, the key will lie in generating intelligence and distributing it efficiently. For now, the changes are focused on allowing and guiding AI’s access to content, but it’s not hard to imagine a web where human browsing becomes more and more complicated. If sites have to choose, what type of visitor will they prioritize? Which one will they optimize for? How will we move around the internet in 5 years?