Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, said in an interview at the SXSW conference in Austin that online bot traffic is expected to exceed human user traffic for the first time in history by 2027, as generative AI (GenAI) develops rapidly and its demand for data continues to grow.

AI

Prince explained that before the GenAI era, only about 20% of internet traffic was from bots, mainly consisting of reputable crawlers like Google's and malicious traffic from fraudsters. The rise of GenAI is completely changing this situation. AI agents, which may need to visit thousands of websites to answer a user query such as purchasing a digital camera, often access 1000 times more than real people, causing real traffic loads. Although the current growth is slower compared to the explosive growth during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is steady and shows no signs of slowing down, requiring all industries to face and consider it.

Prince believes that AI is essentially a platform revolution that fundamentally changes how information is accessed. To address this trend, Cloudflare is working on building the underlying infrastructure to support the development of new technologies, such as "agent sandboxes" that can be launched, run, and destroyed like a new browser tab for AI agents.

As a company providing infrastructure and security services to one-fifth of the world's websites, Cloudflare's products, including content delivery networks (CDN), DDoS protection, "always-on" caching technology, and tools to block AI bot traffic, will continue to help websites maintain high availability, fast loading, and defend against attacks.