That’s for sure. The dead internet theory will come true by 2027

In the coming years, artificial intelligence is expected to significantly change not only the way we use the Internet, but also the very nature of Internet traffic. In my opinion Matthew Princeboss Cloudflarealready in 2027 traffic generated by AI bots can outpace traffic from humans. This forecast was made during the SXSW conference, which took place this week in the USA.

Prince points out that AI bots and agents work completely differently than regular users. A person who is looking for a camera, for example, will visit several websites and make a decision based on them. An AI agent performing the same task can look at up to thousands of sites to gather data and prepare a response. From an internet perspective, this means a real increase in the load on servers, connections and the entire infrastructurewhich website owners and service providers will have to deal with.

Even before the AI ​​boom, bot traffic accounted for about 20% of the entire internet, according to Prince. A large part of this pool consisted of legal indexing robots, such as Google crawlerand the rest was supplemented by, among others, tools used for fraud and abuse. Now the situation is changing quickly, because AI models have a huge appetite for data, which directly translates into an increasing number of automatic queries and website visits.

According to Cloudflare’s CEO, the answer to this trend will be new infrastructure solutions. It’s about special, temporary environments for AI agentswhich can be launched instantly while the task is being completed and then deleted. This type of mechanisms would support the growing number of automated processes.

Anyway more traffic means more demand for data centers, servers and energy. Prince recalled that streaming has seen a surge in popularity during the pandemic pushed parts of the Internet to its limits. This time the growth is not so sudden, but it has a different problematic nature – it is not slowing down, but constantly accelerating For now, there is little indication that this trend will reverse.

This is obviously a business opportunity for Cloudflarebecause the company specializes in protection against DDoS attacks and accelerating the operation of websites. At the same time, the scale of the company’s operations allows it to observe changes taking place on the Internet from an exceptionally broad perspective.

Prince argues that AI is not a passing fad, but the next big technological breakthroughcomparable to switching from computers to smartphones. If he is right, in the coming years not only how we look for information will change, but also who will actually dominate the Internet.