This kind of thing was going to happen eventually.
Bot traffic has surpassed humans on the Internet. The winners in the next infrastructure cycle are the companies building trust rails for machines: agent identity, intent verification, API-native content delivery.
www.forbes.com
Bots Now Outnumber Humans Online And The Internet Was Never Built For This
Just yesterday
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince posted on X that automated bot traffic had crossed a threshold no one in the industry expected this soon: for the first time in the internet’s history, machines now generate more web traffic than people.
Cloudflare’s Radar dashboard puts bots at 57.5% of all HTTP requests to HTML content, humans at 42.5%. Prince had predicted the crossover by end of 2027, but we got there eighteen months early.
The internet was architected around human usability and attention, and the entire world of digital advertising, SaaS conversion funnels, publisher monetization, and e-commerce UX sits on that assumption.
Imperva’s 2026 Bad Bot Report frames it: companies that continue operating under the assumption that users are human, risk misreading their own systems. For any VC investors this is a potential repricing event across every category that monetizes human attention, as every media asset, ecommerce site and brand was built for humans - not bots.
The culprit is not the old wave of scraper bots and search crawlers, but agentic AI. At SXSW in March, Prince described the request-volume asymmetry: a human shopping for a camera visits five websites; the agent doing the same task visits 5,000.
HUMAN Security’s 2026 State of AI Traffic report found AI-driven traffic growing eight times faster than human traffic across 2025. Agentic AI, bots acting on behalf of users rather than scraping for training data, made up just 1.7% of automated traffic at the start of last year.
By the end of 2025 that category had grown 8,000%.
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The good news for SoSuave is forums aren't a likely target since there's no financial incentive for spam posting other than the ego gratification of the AI enabled poster.
But that kind of sucks for humanity in the long run. If more and more people need to rely on AI to post anonymously on a forum, society is pretty much cooked.