“Bots don't click on ads. They don't respond to pretty swirls of paint and what we traditionally think of as a brand.”
Decoder with Nilay Patel · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · September 2026
Prince kept being asked at conferences when automated traffic would overtake human traffic online, and each time Cloudflare pulled the data the date moved earlier — until in May his team told him it had already happened. He now expects automated traffic to be a thousand times human traffic within five years. His point is that someone has to pay for the infrastructure carrying all of it, and the advertising model that funded the web for thirty years doesn't work on machines.
Transcript
It's usually when I'm trying to answer a question at a cocktail party and I don't want to talk to the person anymore. I say that. What I'd say, if I actually was sort of interested in talking to the person more is probably that Cloudflare is trying to rebuild the internet the way it should have been built from the beginning if we knew how important it was going to be. And so we run a giant network. We're in over 350 cities worldwide, literally thousands of data centers. In all those places, we have equipment running. And then we do a handful of things. We stop if you're trying to put an application or content online. We make sure that it's safe. If you're a person who is an employee who's online, we make sure that wherever you go online is safe. We help give people the ability to write applications that can scale to an entire internet audience and run on the infrastructure that we have. That's the fastest growing part of our business. And I think the thing that we've recently started to think about is the business model of the internet is changing dramatically. And we're sort of trying to help work on shaping what that future business model of the internet looks like and how can we make it as healthy as possible.
Can I connect the dots between the business model of the internet, how the internet should have worked, and Cloudflare trying to build the internet as it should have been? That is different than Cloudflare protects from bad guys. I will note that's what you said to me last time, which now makes me feel like you didn't want to talk to me at the cocktail party, but that's fine. That's a shift. That's just a notable shift, right? The business model of the internet has dramatically changed because of AI, because of bot traffic, because of AI scrapers, the whole thing. Describe what you think the business model of the internet is right now and what it should be.
So, for the last at least 30 years, the business model of the internet has been advertising. It's not the entire business model of the internet, but it's really the thing that has driven all of the growth of the web, all of the growth of what has built what we all enjoy today, and is really a miracle. And the company that is responsible for that more than any other is Google, who for the last 28 years has really defined that. And we all think of it for the search business that they have, but they really built out all of the ecosystem around advertising online. They bought double-click, they built things like Google Analytics that lets you actually see who was coming to your property. And they really are the hero of sort of what I call like the first generation of the internet and the first generation of the web. What's changing, though, very quickly is who is actually using the web or what is using the web. Last November, I was at the web summit, the big European tech event. And I was asked, when do you think that non-human traffic agents and all of those things are going to pass human traffic online? And we have a lot of data because we see a huge percentage of the internet. And so we pulled all of that data and looked at it and said that it would be the second half of 2027. Automated traffic will become larger than human traffic, which kind of felt like a big deal that we could see that first time in the internet's history. I was asked again at South by Southwest in March of this year, 2026, and we pulled the data again and it had moved up where it was going to then be the first half of 2027. We're like, wow, this is growing. I mean, this AI thing is a big deal and people are using it like crazy and it's driving a huge amount of traffic. And so I was stunned when just a few months later in May, Team came to me and said, you won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online. And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out with the giant caveat that I've run wrong so far in every prediction that I've made on this, but five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be a thousand times human traffic online. Not because human traffic is going to decline. We think it'll stay kind of around the same, but because we're just seeing such an explosion in all of this, the rest of the traffic. And the challenge of that is if you have, first of all, a thousand times more traffic, someone's got to pay for the infrastructure to power that. Like that's going to require bandwidth, that's going to require servers, that's going to require a lot of things in order to make that happen. And the traditional model of how to pay for that, which was advertising, doesn't work for bots. Bots don't click on ads. They don't respond to pretty swirls of paint and what we traditionally think of as a brand. And so we've got to come up with something else that's going to power that just incredible, insatiable demand that's going to be put on the internet going forward. And that's what I'm spending a lot of my time trying to think about what that's going to look like.
When you describe that as a business model, that sort of implies that there's going to be customers and revenue and profits. And I don't know if any of that's true.
I mean, I think there's, I mean, there's certainly a lot of revenue. Well, there's
maybe for the Cloudflares and the Googles of the world, but for the
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