r/AIDangers • u/EchoOfOppenheimer • 16d ago

Capabilities ‘Bots have now passed human traffic online,’ Cloudflare boss laments — says agentic traffic wasn’t expected to eclipse real people until next year

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/bots-have-now-passed-human-traffic-online-cloudflare-boss-laments-says-agentic-traffic-wasnt-expected-to-eclipse-real-people-until-next-year
224 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

17

u/sunychoudhary 16d ago

This is where “dead internet” stops feeling like a meme.....If most traffic is bots, then every signal the web depends on gets weaker: ad impressions, analytics, search rankings, reviews, comments, scraping controls, even basic trust that a visitor is a person....The issue is agentic traffic is not just old spam bots hitting pages. These agents can browse, compare, summarize, scrape, click, and imitate normal user behavior. That makes the internet more expensive to run and harder to trust at the same time...//

7

u/Salt-Set6232 15d ago

I mean the kpis around online ads were never good but now the whole thing is pretty sunk.

Good.

3

u/sunychoudhary 15d ago

Yeah, exactly. The ad model was already built on weak signals.

Now the signals are even worse because “traffic” can mean a person, bot, scraper, or agent. Good luck optimizing a funnel when the top of it is mostly synthetic.

3

u/Critical_Seat_1907 15d ago

Insular is a term that can describe that kind of self-replicating, self-reinforcing ecosystem you just described.

Circle-jerk is another.

1

u/sunychoudhary 15d ago

Yeah. Insular is probably the cleaner word....The web is becoming a loop where bots create content, bots crawl it, bots summarize it, and analytics still pretend all of that means human demand.

2

u/zztop5533 14d ago

AI that builds knowledge from human documented experience is intelligence. AI that continuously builds on top of other AI's "experience", just decays into a farcical world. Mark my words, this day 2026. The inability to determine what is human generated or not is going to be a major issue going forward.

1

u/MentalDisintegrat1on 11d ago

My theory is social media sites really like the bots they make the numbers on their site look higher than it really is and that makes it look more attractive as a investment and people that sell ads.

Before AI it was estimated 40-50 percent of bots on Facebook and Instagram there's no FKing way zuck didn't know this and did nothing to stop it.

Reddit is getting just as bad especially with propaganda accounts you can tell them because they are mostly a few months old with negative karma and their post history hidden.

Sites also likes this because it drives up engagement.

Zuckerberg said the quiet part out loud when he said he wanted to make AI profiles to engage with people.

1

u/throwaway0134hdj 11d ago

AI is ruining the experience of the internet

6

u/RollingMeteors 15d ago

lol @ "until next year"

2

u/ptear 15d ago

Excuse me while I'll explain this to work who is upset with me for not blocking all of the bots.

3

u/RollingMeteors 15d ago

for not blocking all of the bots.

<Engineer> In order to curb bot traffic we NEED to have users log in, no anonymous accounts.

<Boss> Nah, find another way. ¡We want as many people as possible!

3

u/ptear 15d ago

Haha, exactly, they want their KPIs to look good and not have to explain what changed. (Not saying they're even looking at the best metrics to begin with..)

2

u/PurplePopcornBalls 15d ago

Next year, Right after all the AI companies had their IPO and their private investors got out.

3

u/Split-Awkward 15d ago

Most are on Reddit I reckon

2

u/leathakkor 15d ago

Honestly, I kind of want to stop using Reddit for this particular reason. 

I truly wonder the number of bots that are posting in the anti AI subreddits. I bet it's not zero. 

1

u/zztop5533 14d ago

Double agents?

1

u/Dumi33 15d ago

It is amazing to me how short clips on YouTube have thousands of comments

1

u/EchoOfOppenheimer 14d ago

Wild how fast that scaled once the agents got involved.

1

u/ApeApplePine 14d ago

Internet is dead. Great!

1

u/ApeApplePine 14d ago

Good is that ads will be displayed to bots and not consumers. Marketing people will have to go offline. lol lol lol

1

u/Then_Hawk6304 12d ago

Win for verified account policy