AI bot traffic surge pushes automated web requests past humans
Cloudflare and Thales say bots now make up most web requests, as AI agents force companies to rethink analytics, APIs and payments.
By Hana Yoshida · Markets Reporter
3 min read
AI bot traffic has moved from a fringe internet concern to a measurable majority of web activity, according to cybersecurity and web infrastructure firms cited by Fortune. Cloudflare says bots generated 57.5% of webpage requests in June, while Thales dates the shift to 2023 and put bot traffic at 53% in its 2026 Bad Bot Report.
The competing estimates show how hard the change is to measure. Rudy Yang, an enterprise and retail fintech analyst at PitchBook, told Fortune that no single company can see the entire web and that providers use different methods to count automated activity.
Yang said the available data still points in the same direction: bot activity is rising, and agentic AI is driving much of the browser activity companies now see. Agentic AI refers to systems that can take actions on a user’s behalf, such as clicking links, using websites or filling out forms.
How much web traffic comes from AI agents?
Traffic from agents that perform actions on websites rose 7,851% year over year, according to HUMAN Security’s 2026 State of AI Traffic & Cyberthreat Benchmark Report. Scraper traffic grew 597% over the same period, while AI training crawlers still accounted for 67.5% of AI-driven traffic but made up a smaller share of the total than before.
The pace surprised some industry watchers. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince predicted in March that bots would not account for more than half of web traffic until the end of 2027, Fortune reported. Cloudflare’s own data showed that threshold arriving more than a year earlier.
The shift cuts into assumptions behind much of the web economy. Advertising impressions, pageview analytics and conversion funnels were built around human visitors. Yang wrote in PitchBook’s July report that building for agent traffic will become necessary for companies and developers.
Yang told Fortune that agents consume the web differently from people and may become a new category of customer for businesses. That could affect how companies design websites, measure user behavior and decide which automated visitors to allow.
How are companies changing for AI agents?
Some companies are already reporting agent-heavy usage. Stripe said 70% of commands used to access data through an API are coming from agents. Alpaca, an API brokerage firm, said agent-driven activity helped push its monthly API calls from single digits in the fourth quarter of 2025 to 30% in the first quarter of 2026.
Developers are responding as well. Postman reported that about 25% of developers now build APIs with agents as the main end user, and more than half cite unauthorized agent access as a security concern.
Yang listed Visa, Ramp, Mercury, ElevenLabs, Stripe, Coinbase, MoonPay and DoorDash among companies that have launched command line interfaces geared toward agents. He wrote that more agent-native tools could give agents broader access to perform work, which in turn could lead companies to build more agent-first infrastructure.
Detection remains uneven. Bot-detection systems can count traffic that identifies itself as automated or matches known patterns, but agentic browsers that behave like humans can avoid older filters. A University of Bamberg study found soft block rates of 7% to 15% from detection systems wrongly flagging real traffic, while Seer Interactive has warned since 2023 that agentic browsers can distort engagement, bounce rate and session-duration data.
PitchBook still describes the “machine economy” as small compared with the broader economy. The firm estimates that only about 1% of roughly $20 trillion in work that could be handed to AI agents is flowing through them today. Forsy separately estimates global agent GDP at a $36 billion annual run rate.
Yang told Fortune that agents cannot fully take part in the online economy until payment systems and liability questions are addressed. Without payment infrastructure for agents, he said, they are not yet broadly buying, selling or generating economic activity.
This story draws on original reporting from Fortune.