Cloudflare CFO: Humans Will Be 'Rounding Error' as AI Traffic Surges 1,000x in Five Years

Cloudflare chief says humans will soon be 'a rounding error on the Internet' as bot traffic takes over -- so what is it doing to combat this?

* Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert predicts machine-generated traffic could outnumber humans by a 1,000 times in the next five years * The answer to this, Seifert believes, is to ensure servers are efficient enough to handle demand * Cloudflare previously predicted machines would outnumber humans in 2027, but this digital soothsaying was 12 months out Machine-generated internet traffic is already outnumbering that by humans, and it shows no sign of declining, experts have warned. Cloudflare Chief Financial Officer Thomas Seifert has predicted man-made activity will be dwarfed by bots and agentic applications, with such machine traffic could be 1,000 times more than human traffic within the next five years. However, Seifert was at pains to mention he has form for getting these predictions wrong. The "rounding error" online However, right or wrong, human traffic is already outnumbered by bots online, which means measures have to be taken for the internet to remain useful to people, or else grind to a halt under the weight of automated traffic. Cloudflare believes making efficiencies is the solution, but those optimizations may be something other companies need to focus on. While we may feel that the internet exists for humans to communicate and shop or spend money on a service, the truth is that it is increasingly dominated by machine-generated traffic. Traditional bots have been replaced with agentic AI and other automated tools, and every request has an impact on servers (and the rest of the internet infrastructure). Cloudflare's role in providing cloud services that provide security, performance, and general infrastructure is key to overseeing the traffic, with many websites relying on its protective shield to improve load times and mitigate online threats. Explaining the thinking behind the predicted increase, Seifert said on a recent Cloudflare earnings call: "To give you a sense of how this trend is playing out, and with the big caveat that I have called it wrong at every point along the way, if the current trends continue, we think in five years, non-human traffic will be as much as 1,000 times as much as human traffic." "In other words, humans will be a rounding error on the internet, not because human traffic goes down, but that's just how fast we're seeing non-human traffic grow." Efficiency questions Just how can servers and infrastructure be more efficient? Will this efficiency focus on human or machine generated and agentic transactions? Some solutions are intelligent traffic management, optimized protocols, hardware acceleration, and edge computing. Discussions in Cloudflare's earnings call pointed at where the greatest efficiencies may be made - in its competitors, where GPU utilization is "super low," due to them "buying a server and then trying to sell it back, lease it back" and putting the onus on the customer to "get as much out of the server as possible." Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.

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? 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?