Most internet traffic is no longer human
Cloudflare’s numbers, what agents are crawling for, and why AEO matters now.
September 20, 2026
Here’s some perspective: the majority of users on the internet are no longer human.
In June 2026, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said automated traffic had passed humans for the first time, with bots (or rather, “agents”) making up 57% of Internet traffic. In all measurements across the board, agent traffic is increasing rapidly.
CFO Thomas Seifert added that if current trends hold, non-human traffic could be ~1,000× human traffic in five years — with the caveat that Cloudflare has consistently underestimated how fast this moved.
From that same report, we can see what the agents were doing: 52% of identified crawler requests were for AI training, >36% were mixed-use (search + agent + training), and pure search crawl is a shrinking share.
To put it simply, these agents are crawling the internet to learn. To learn about a website, read its content, and remember the business. The more it learns, the smarter the AI becomes.
Once the AI learns a business, it’ll start to appear in recommendation results from ChatGPT, Claude, and more when someone asks a related question. Mastering this is a growing specialization called AEO: Answer Engine Optimization.
Similar to SEO, AEO doesn’t come without a bit of work. There’s certain audits and updates a business needs to make in order to prepare content for serving to agent traffic. The more prepared a website is, the more discoverable and readable a business is to AI systems, and the more likely it is to be cited or recommended when people ask related questions.
For example, a financial services company that has done a bit of work to optimize for agent traffic will get recommended to ChatGPT users more than a competitor who has not done this work.
AEO is only one part of the puzzle in the new field of Agent Experience. AI is reshaping the business world, and those who take action now will be more prepared to win in the next era of an agent-dominated internet.
Don’t know where to start? Send us a message. We’re happy to be driving these results for several of our clients and can provide a free Agent Readiness Report. This includes a score and free recommendations to get started. Let us know below.