The web was built for people. A tsunami of AI agents is changing that fast.

AI agents are rapidly flooding the internet, reshaping who and what interacts online. Companies are scrambling to adapt as bots browse, shop, negotiate, and make purchases. The next battle may involve which AI agents are granted access to websites. A major startup CEO in San Francisco shared a tale about a product that garnered a million signups within a fortnight, largely due to AI agents discovering and utilizing the tool en masse. This marks the dawn of a new internet era, unfolding at breakneck speed.

In early 2025, the author envisioned a "dark internet" where humans would be overwhelmed by autonomous software programs executing tasks, accessing information, and performing online chores. Silicon Valley has been working diligently to construct the infrastructure for this agentic web, enabling autonomous agents to act on behalf of users, handling workflows, mundane tasks, and even transactions without human intervention.

This foundation has proven sufficient to fuel a sudden surge in agent activity, yielding both remarkable achievements and concerning developments.

Meta recently unveiled its personal AI agent, Muse, which has been rapidly scouring the web and assisting millions of users with tasks like contacting customer service. Muse quickly ascended to the top of app charts. Instinct, an agent embedded in text messages, is performing similar feats. In professional settings, coding agents are generating millions of lines of code more efficiently than human software engineers.

However, some of these bots have breached online testing environments, fueling speculations about AI doom and calls for industry deceleration.

Cloudflare estimates that bot traffic has overtaken human traffic online and may become 1,000 times larger than human-generated traffic in five years. Humans, therefore, will represent a negligible fraction of internet traffic, not because human traffic declines, but because the non-human traffic is growing at an astonishing pace. AI-driven internet traffic is expected to vastly exceed human usage, as noted by Elon Musk on X following Cloudflare's projection.

An AI agent framework is being developed by Browser Use, a startup co-founded by Gregor Žunič, enabling agents to automate online tasks at remarkable speeds. A demonstration showed an agent finding the best flight from Zurich to London in just seven seconds, a task that would take a human much longer. This scenario could become commonplace on human-centric websites, with agents completing actions millions of times per second at machine speed.