Cloudflare CEO Says AI Agent Traffic Could Be 1,000X Human Traffic in Five Years

Matthew Prince (0:00)

The automated traffic, the agent traffic, has already passed human traffic online in early 2026, way ahead of what our schedule looked like.

It was just like, wow, this is incredible. And if you extrapolate that out, with the caveat that I've been wrong in every prediction I've made so far, it looks like in five years, agentic traffic is going to be a thousand times as much as human traffic. Now, because we think human traffic is gonna decline, we know it will hold pretty steady, but agents are just exploding. And I think that's gonna put all kinds of different pressures. Yet, what is the future business model of the internet? But also, who's gonna pay for all the infrastructure that these agents are gonna inherently use?

Jennifer Sanasie (0:43)

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Matthew Prince (1:15)

Thank you for having me.

Jennifer Sanasie (1:16)

All right, I'm really excited about this conversation. You've been at this for a long time, almost two decades at Cloudflare.

Matthew Prince (1:24)

That made me just feel really old.

Jennifer Sanasie (1:25)

No, I don't want you to feel really old. You have so much information.

Matthew Prince (1:29)

Literally, before we started here, we were talking about how I'm going to like a geriatric dance party this weekend.

Jennifer Sanasie (1:34)

I just want to let the audience know, yes, we were talking about that and it got me excited.

Matthew Prince (1:39)

There you go. Well, I'll see you there.

Jennifer Sanasie (1:41)

Yeah, exactly. I'll see you at the dance party this week.

Matthew Prince (1:43)

The geriatric dance party.

Jennifer Sanasie (1:44)

The geriatric dance party.

All right. Talk to me, I know you've spoken a lot about the lessons you've learned over the years, but talk to me about what you're building towards. What is the next iteration of the internet look like to you? And where do you feel the stratosphere is maybe getting it wrong?

Matthew Prince (2:05)

Yeah, I mean, I think what's really so interesting and fascinating about this point in time is that the internet has felt like this very fixed thing. Like it's existed, it's had a really established business model, largely driven by ads over the years, e-commerce as well, a little bit subscriptions. But like that's been what's powered the internet for the last 30 years. It's the internet that I grew up with, it's the internet that everyone is familiar with. And as AI is taking off, what's happening is we've got this new interface for the internet, which is the AI prompts and everything that they do. And because people are consuming information, because increasingly they're going to be conducting commerce through their agent, it's changing the business model of the internet. Agents don't click on ads, agents can use one subscription and spread it across many, many different users.

All of those things are changing exactly how it happens. And at the same time, the volumes are just crazy. I was asked in November of 2025 at Web Summit, a big technology conference, when did I think that automated traffic would pass human traffic online? And we looked at all the data, we pulled it and thought, oh, it looks like it's going to be the second half of 2027

A few months later at South by Southwest, in March of 2026, I was asked the same question again, pulled the data again, and we were blown away that it had been moved up to the first half of 2027 And again, it just showed how much things were accelerating. And so when my team in May came to me and said, you won't believe it, but the automated traffic, the agent traffic has already passed human traffic online in early 2026, like way ahead of what our schedule looked like. It was just like, wow, this is incredible. And if you extrapolate that out, with the caveat that I've been wrong in every prediction I've made so far, it looks like in five years, agentic traffic is going to be 1,000 times as much as human traffic. Now, because we think human traffic is going to decline, we can all hold pretty steady, but agents are just exploding. And I think that's going to put all kinds of different pressures. What is the future business model of the internet, but also who's going to pay for all the infrastructure that these agents are going to inherently use?