The internet is mostly bots now. Where does that leave us?

According to Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder of Cloudflare, bot traffic on the internet has officially overtaken human traffic. He thought we had until late 2027 before this happened, but bots have already outnumbered us.

Right now, 57.4% of daily web traffic is just automated bots and AI agents scraping data, loading pages, and doing tasks. Only 42.6% is actual human beings.

If you look at the map, it gets a bit ridiculous. In Gibraltar, 92% of the traffic is bots. Singapore is sitting at 76%.

It makes you think, doesn’t it?

If bots are the ones crawling the web, and bots are also the ones being built to generate content, where does that leave the rest of us? We’re heading toward a bizarre situation where you’ve got data centres spending billions of pounds to power bots that create content, only for other bots to consume it

We’ve seen this ourselves. Over the last couple of years, the volume of bot activity hitting the Media Music Now library has skyrocketed. They aren’t there to listen to the nuance of a cello movement or look for the perfect emotional arc for a film scene. They are there to scrape, index, and mimic.

It makes you wonder where it all goes from here.

If this version of the internet is slowly being handed over to data centres scraping data centres, what do we do? People don’t tend to stick around when a neighbourhood gets ruined. So, will we just move?

Maybe we’re looking at a split of the web. The ‘Dead Internet’ ticking away on a loop in the background, bots generating content for other bots to consume, no humans involved, while we end up building a completely separate space just for actual people.

Who knows if that’s even possible, or how you’d even police it. But if bots and AI keep making the current internet more useless by the day, it feels like something has to give.

For those of us making music, words, and ideas for a human audience, the question isn’t really about bots. It’s about whether there’ll still be a human on the other end worth making it for. I think there will be. But protecting that space will take some work.