Cloudflare CEO forecasts bots at 1,000x human web traffic

Bot traffic passed human web traffic on Cloudflare's network in May, and CEO Matthew Prince told The Verge's Decoder podcast that it is on track to reach one thousand times human volume within five years.

"Bots don't click on ads," Prince told host Nilay Patel, arguing the ad-supported model that funds most of the open web cannot survive that shift.

The revision has been fast. In November 2025 Cloudflare predicted the crossover would arrive in the second half of 2027. By South by Southwest in March 2026 it had pulled the estimate to the first half of 2027. By May, Prince said, his teams told him it had already happened.

His answer is a paid web. Cloudflare is working with Coinbase and Stripe to revive HTTP 402, the long-dormant "payment required" status code, so publishers can charge AI agents "a thousandth of a penny" per page. It launched pay-per-crawl in private beta on July 1, 2025, and on September 15 flipped the default so free-tier customers block Google from using their sites for AI training.

Google is the pressure point. Prince told Patel that if Google "won't differentiate between AI training and search engine training, we're just going to block them across the board," and claimed Google's crawler reaches 3.2 times more of the web than OpenAI's.

He also owns the Park Record in Park City, Utah, and said the paper expects to earn more from AI licensing this year than from digital advertising. Reddit, he told Patel, is already earning seven to fourteen times more per token in AI licensing deals than The New York Times.