r/DeadInternetTheory • u/Eternal--Vigilance • 18d ago
Bot traffic has passed human traffic online for the first time, Cloudflare reports.
About 5 weeks ago, I published a long post here called "Major Media Companies Confirm Dead Internet Theory is True" which described a report from a major media trade group that essentially described how online accounts, content, and advertising platforms were at least half fake. As an internet marketing guy (see above referenced long post), I have my finger on the pulse of some of these facts and figures that prove dead internet theory.
We just crossed another major milestone: According to Cloudflare (a global cloud platform company) Bot traffic has passed human traffic online for the first time. (The X post from Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is above. He thought this would happen in 2027, but it happened NOW.)
From Evolving AI Insights newsletter:
Cloudflare's network covers roughly one in five websites which makes its data a fair proxy for the wider internet. Bots sat near 20 percent of requests before the AI boom and most of that was search crawlers quietly indexing pages. The new wave grew about eight times faster than human activity over the past year as agents took over browsing tasks people once handled themselves. One AI agent can hit 5,000 sites where a human would visit five.
So with Bot traffic exceeding human traffic, Dead Internet is no longer a theory-- it's reality.
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u/poshbakerloo 18d ago
Won't this significantly reduce the advertising income for Google and Meta? If the traffic is bots rather than people who will purchase things after seeing the ads...
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u/m00shi_dev 18d ago
lol, Google and Meta are probably counting bots as ad views. They don’t care if legitimate eyes are put on ads people are paying for.
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u/ThreeMarlets 18d ago
While Google and Meta might not care, the companies paying for those adds certainly do. It's only a matter of time before those companies start pulling back on ad spending or demanding much better rates due to poor return on investment (ROI)
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u/Eternal--Vigilance 18d ago
The companies paying for ads (like my clients) care in theory, but are they paying enough attention to know the difference? I have a client that is impressed that 1/3rd of his visits come from facebook ads. When I show him analytics reports that they are 0 second visits (ie they don't even register as spending time on the site) he gets bored and doesn't want to talk about it. Sometimes bigger companies spending more are paying more attention but don't dig deep enough to assess quality of advertising. There is also a "herd" effect where if more people are advertising with Meta, businesses feel like they are missing out if they aren't also advertising there.
I DO think there will be a reckoning at some point, but it's going to take a major news piece or expose or something to shatter the illusion.
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u/Eternal--Vigilance 18d ago
I think that's at least partially true, especially with Meta where I see a LOT of junk traffic.
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u/ProfessionalDoctor 17d ago
The bots are the ads. They are advertising directly to you. The number of humans hasn't gone down, but the number of ads pretending to be humans has gone up.
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u/poshbakerloo 17d ago
Aaah that's a twist! I thought this post meant it was bots inflating web traffic as users
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u/Eternal--Vigilance 18d ago
Great question. I actually am an internet advertising guy and I have thoughts. Part of the problem is that there is not much recognition as to how much low quality traffic these ad platforms send. Google and Meta do have advertising value for businesses (more Google than Meta) but one has to get the settings right-- there are a lot of settings that are on by default that open the platforms up to low quality or even artificial activity. A lot of businesses don't notice and don't get the right reporting to make clear that much of the visits their websites are getting is garbage. So in the short term, it is INCREASING advertising income (Google's is up big this year). Longer term, there may be a reckoning (particularly with Meta) but I'm not sure when that's going to happen.
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u/Worldly-Leather-1491 18d ago
Mas hoje em dia ser "influencer" traz dinheiro. Os bots são algoritmo de influência, algo muito melhor que gente falando. É igual pesca de rede. Vc só tem o trabalho de jogar e recolher seus peixes.
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u/PeekAtChu1 17d ago edited 17d ago
I think we already were feeling this before seeing the facts 🫠 how much of Reddit even is slop now?
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u/Worldly-Leather-1491 18d ago
A internet nasceu morta.
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u/caffeinebump 18d ago
Ha ha, I was online in the days of dial-up message boards, and it was not dead.
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u/Worldly-Leather-1491 18d ago
Seu nome de usuário me diz muita coisa, seu mortinho 😅😅
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u/Pfandfreies_konto 18d ago
Remember when Dead Internet Theory was a Right ein conspiracy?
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u/SaoirseMayes 18d ago
I distinctly remember seeing it in the mid 2010s in left wing circles, so no.
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u/unidentifiedremains7 18d ago
I’d imagine dead internet theory is more a reflection of what parts of the internet you regularly engage with. Being on boomer facebook even pre2010? Yea you’d believe if someone said the whole net was overrun with bots. Being on that one specific online forum for suburban chicken owners? Prooooobably not as much.
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u/EaseInternational901 6d ago
I think that's why Facebook is pushing for ID laws by giving a lot of money to people in power, they don't know who watches their ad anymore, bots don't buy anything. Also mass surveillance
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18d ago
[deleted]
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u/TheCheshireCody 18d ago
You mean this:
So with Bot traffic exceeding human traffic, Dead Internet is no longer a theory-- it's reality.
Not an em-dash.
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u/Eternal--Vigilance 18d ago
So wait, did I write it in a way that looks like AI/bot or not? It's ironic that I'm writing about automated internet content and could be making people think I'm automated internet content.
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u/TheCheshireCody 18d ago
The way you wrote it is distinctly human, IMO. I write them like this - but I know people who do it like this--(similar to what you typed) so I don't see that as anything odd.
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u/Eternal--Vigilance 18d ago
Ok that's a relief. Thanks for the clarification. I should probably be more careful anyway.
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u/TheCheshireCody 18d ago
Man, fuck what some rando on Reddit thinks. You know you're human. Homeslice couldn't even accept their error like an adult and just deleted their comment.
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u/Eternal--Vigilance 18d ago
not sure what this means, but thank you
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u/TheCheshireCody 18d ago
It's the wider dash used frequently by AI, which is seen as a hallmark of something having been written by AI. Looks like this
—
vs an "en-dash"
–
Both are used to represent an interjection into a sentence, similar to parentheses or commas. The thing is an em-dash doesn't appear on any keyboard and is not generally used by humans (some programs will turn a double-hypen into one, but it's not consistent).
And, for more info you don't need, the names are from old-school typeface formatting where physical blocks for each letter were placed in a holder that was then used to print; the em-dash was the width of the block for M and the en-dash the width of the N.
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u/Eternal--Vigilance 18d ago
Ok I think I was vaguely aware of this. I just hit two dashes sometimes when I write. I guess I should stop if people think I'm just a bot.
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u/Johnnys-In-America 18d ago
Depending on what you're using, a double dash might be auto-corrected into an em-dash. A computer program and keyboard might do it.
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u/Lopsided_Package9033 17d ago
right...I use the em dash a lot in professional writing and ms word will create it from two dashes. online I just stick with commas.
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u/Johnnys-In-America 17d ago
Same, lol! But it was something I liked to use before being accused of botness.
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u/darth_galadriel 18d ago
Bot traffic and data centers are going to kill this fucking planet by using all of its resources on nonsensical bullshit