Before going on, it\u2019s important to differentiate this new surge in internet traffic from the traditional bots most will be aware of, things like website crawlers, search indexers, and bad stuff like fraud or abuse bots. It is different now, as Cloudflare <\/a>is charting agents that browse the web much like humans on behalf of humans, and it is already at a massive scale.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n You might wonder what all these AI agent bots are actually up to, particularly if you\u2019re not running your own army of digital helpers. Thankfully, Cloudflare has addressed the scope of AI bot activity in previous articles and blogs. Also, last year it started classifying traffic according to these new website visitors (e.g., signed agents and verified bots), which is why the charts don\u2019t go back very far.<\/p>\n Latest Videos From Cloudflare reckons these AI agents are online doing stuff like reading product pages, checking prices, performing multi-step tasks online like comparing flights, scraping and indexing web content (but for AI models, not search engines), and acting as personal assistants to order food, compare and shop, and handle customer service interactions.<\/p>\n At the time of writing, Cloudflare data suggests that the balance between bot vs. human web traffic (HTTP requests) is already firmly favoring the former, split 57.5 vs. 42.5 percent. A major shift from humans clicking around, being the primary customers of the web, to AI agents doing these tasks has already happened. The rate of change has even taken Prince by surprise. In replies to the embedded Tweet, Prince also noted that the date of the human\/bot crossover wasn\u2019t clear as the \u201cdata [is] a bit messy.\u201d Nevertheless, we are \u201cclearly on the other side now,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n However, Cloudflare metrics measure HTTP requests, not engagement. Flesh-and-blood folks remain the primary users of the web in terms of total time spent in app usage, streaming, and infinite-scrolling feeds. These mediums simply don’t generate the same volume of rapid-fire page-load requests as automated agents<\/a> do.<\/p>\n We were also interested in looking at Cloudflare\u2019s breakdown of human\/bot traffic by country. The most bot-ridden traffic comes from the tiny island of Gibraltar (92.1%), followed by Singapore (76.4%), then Iran <\/a>(76.4%). While some of these places have a lot of data centers and hosting infrastructure compared to population size, Iran\u2019s high bot count may rather come from the heavy use of VPNs with automated scraping and bypass tools. Cloudflare has also previously flagged Iran as a hotspot for malicious bot <\/a>activity.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n <\/a><\/p>\n Follow Tom’s Hardware on Google News<\/a>, or add us as a preferred source<\/a>, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.tomshardware.com\/media\/img\/brand_logo.svg\"){kind=logo}
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