Cloudflare CEO: We're Ready To Block Millions of Websites From AI — With Matthew Prince

**Alex Kantrowitz** (0:00)
In an internet where AI bots now outnumber humans, what happens to the web, and can news information publishers and small businesses survive? That's coming up with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. If you're following where Enterprise AI is actually going and want to get deeper than the headlines, you're going to want to check out Genesis Experience 2026 this September. With two full days of free life keynotes streaming from Las Vegas on September 2nd and 3rd, you'll learn about agentic orchestration, the new operating model for customer experience, and real stories from organizations already deploying AI at scale. I'll be there, filming interviews for our YouTube channel.
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**Alex Kantrowitz** (1:07)
Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool headed and nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Well, on the web, AI bots now outnumber humans. So we have more AI traffic than human traffic and that's obviously changing the dynamics and the incentives for news publishers, information publishers, and of course, small businesses. So what is going to happen to the web?
Well, today we are lucky to be joined by Matthew Prince. He is the CEO of Cloudflare. He was with us almost exactly a year ago, talking about Cloudflare's efforts to prevent the web from disappearing. The web is still here, but maybe not as healthy as it was a year ago, and obviously not due to the failure of those efforts, but the force of AI marches on. So we will talk about what that battle is going to look like moving forward. Matthew, it's great to see you again. Welcome back to the show.

**Matthew Prince** (1:57)
Thanks for having me on.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (1:59)
All right, let's go with the headline here, which is that recently Cloudflare has found that AI bots outnumber humans browsing the web.
I can't tell whether that's surprising or not. I think part of me would say, hey, of course that's happened, and it's surprising that it just happened. The sort of conventionalism is there's always been a lot of bot traffic on the web, just talk a little bit about the escalation in AI traffic that you're seeing, whether that's crawling for new information or agents taking action and what it says about the rise in these type of AI applications recently.

**Matthew Prince** (2:39)
Yeah, I'm certainly surprised. I was asked at Web Summit in November of 2025, when we thought that automated traffic would pass human traffic online, and we pulled all the data and looked at it, and our best estimate based on trends, was that it was going to be in the second half of 2027 At South by Southwest, in March of 2026, was asked the same question again, we pulled the same data again, and we're like, huh, that's interesting. It's moved up. It's now, we think, going to be in the first half of 2027
I was floored when our team came to me and said, in May of 2026, you won't believe it, but we now see that automated traffic is past human traffic for the first time in the history of the Internet. And I think that that really does just show how fast this is progressing and how fast actually the derivative is changing, where the slope of the line is getting steeper. And if we just assume the current trends, what blows my mind is that if you just fast forward five years from now, we estimate now that automated traffic online will be a thousand times what human traffic is. And that's because human traffic is going to drop. It's going to be because automated traffic is just going to continue to rise like crazy over that period of time. And that's going to put enormous strain on the resources of the Internet. It's going to put enormous strain on the infrastructure.
And it's a lot of what the team at Cloudflare is thinking about is, how do we make sure that the Internet is ready for what is going to be just a complete and total onslaught of automated traffic?

**Alex Kantrowitz** (4:20)
Right. And I'm sure you've heard of dead Internet theory. But for those who haven't, it's this theory that one day the Web is basically going to consist of bots and automated content. And the bots will be manipulating that content for algorithmic curation. So what you see in your social feed is effectively a dead Internet that looks like it's real.