More than half of the traffic crossing Cloudflare’s network in the second quarter came from machines, not people. “For the first time in human history, in Q2, more than 50% of the traffic flowing across Cloudflare’s network was not human,” CEO Matthew Prince said on the company’s earnings call, as reported by The Motley Fool.
The crossover came early. At SXSW in March, Prince told TechCrunch that bot traffic would likely pass human traffic in 2027. Before generative AI, he said, bots made up about 20% of internet traffic, with Google’s crawler the largest.
In early June, Prince posted on X that agentic bots had passed human traffic on Cloudflare Radar. “Welp, that happened faster than I predicted,” he wrote. CNET reported that Radar showed agentic AI bots generating 57.4% of web requests, against 42.6% for humans. These are the agents that fetch pages for people using AI chatbots, not the search crawlers that have outnumbered people on many sites for years.
Other measurements point the same way, though no one sees the whole web. Fortune noted that Thales put bot traffic at 53% in its 2026 Bad Bot Report, and that HUMAN Security measured 7,851% year-over-year growth in traffic from agents that click links and fill out forms. Stripe said 70% of the commands hitting its data APIs now come from agents.
The quarter
Cloudflare’s second-quarter revenue rose 36% to $696.1 million, and the company raised its full-year outlook to $2.864 billion to $2.870 billion, about 32% growth. Free cash flow climbed 69% to $56.4 million. Customers paying more than $100,000 a year rose 27% to 4,698, and dollar-based net retention reached 120%. Shares touched a record high the day after the report.
The Motley Fool pointed out that the machine traffic doesn’t pay Cloudflare yet. The company earns subscriptions from businesses that use its network for security and speed, so a fast-growing volume of AI crawler traffic mostly adds cost.
Controls and payments
Cloudflare is building tools to change that. In a July 1 blog post, it said customers, including those on the free plan, can now manage AI traffic in three groups: Search, Agent and Training. Starting Sept. 15, new domains would block Training and Agent bots by default on pages that show ads, while Search stays allowed. Enterprise customers also got BotBase, a searchable directory of known bots and agents.
Prince has said the ad-supported model that funded the web is giving way to machine-to-machine commerce, and that Cloudflare is building the payment layer for sites to charge agents for access.
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