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 that machine-generated internet traffic could be a thousand times greater than human traffic within five years, potentially making humans a "rounding error" on the internet. This prediction, which was 12 months off Seifert's previous forecast of 2027, highlights the growing dominance of non-human traffic on the web.

Cloudflare's role in providing security, performance, and infrastructure for websites places a significant responsibility on the company to manage and maintain the efficiency of servers handling this increasing automated traffic. To meet this challenge, Seifert suggests solutions such as intelligent traffic management, optimized protocols, hardware acceleration, and edge computing.

While human traffic is already outnumbered by bots and agentic applications online, efforts must be made to ensure that the internet remains functional and useful for people. As server efficiency becomes a priority, companies may need to focus on optimizing their own infrastructure to handle the growing demand from automated traffic.