Bots could make up 1,000 times more web traffic than humans within five years, Cloudflare chief executive Matthew Prince told The Verge. He made the forecast on Nilay Patel’s Decoder podcast. He added that each of his earlier predictions on bot traffic had been wrong.

They were wrong because bots grew faster than he expected. At Web Summit last November, Prince said automated traffic would pass human traffic in the second half of 2027. By March, Cloudflare’s data pointed to the first half of 2027. In May, his team told him it had already happened.

“Five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be 1,000 times human traffic online,” Prince said.

Human traffic will stay roughly flat, he said. The growth comes from AI scrapers and agents. Cloudflare sits in front of more than 20% of the web.

Charging the bots

For about 30 years, the web’s business model has been advertising, Prince said. That model does not work for bots.

“Bots don’t click on ads,” he said.

Cloudflare is working with Coinbase and Stripe to revive HTTP 402, a “payment required” code from the web’s early days. Site owners could charge AI agents a fraction of a penny for each page they access. Valuable content could cost more. Prince said AI companies on the buying side and big publishers on the selling side are both willing.

Patel pushed back on whether such a market would give people a reason to publish on the web. Yahoo chief executive Jim Lanzone said last week micropayments will never be enough for publishers.

From 15 September, Cloudflare set its free customers to block Google from using their sites for AI training by default. Site owners can switch the setting off.

“If they won’t differentiate between AI training and search engine training, we’re just going to block them across the board,” Prince said.

He said Google has committed to more transparency about its crawler. After a ruling in the UK, Google signalled that its crawler would say what it is doing on each page, Prince said. Publishers could then choose, and Google would apply this beyond the UK. Brussels is also asking publishers whether Google’s AI opt-out works.

Prince and his wife own the Park Record, a local newspaper in Park City, Utah. He expects it to make more from AI licensing deals than from digital advertising this year. In AI licensing, Reddit earns seven to 14 times more per token than The New York Times, he said.