Vercel Founder: 58% of Internet Traffic Comes from Bots, Over 60% of Deployments Triggered by Proxies
Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel, revealed that in the past 30 days, 58.18% of internet traffic came from bots, a significant increase from 32% in January 2024; currently, over 60% of deployments are completed by proxies, compared to about 3% in January 2026.
He further pointed out that up to 83% of page views on Vercel's own documentation site come from proxies, and this percentage continues to rise as content is optimized for proxies; he expects that direct human internet traffic will essentially become negligible in the future.
Rauch stated that the internet itself will continue to thrive but will mainly be built and served by proxies; he has previously mentioned that the proportion of deployments triggered by coding proxies has rapidly increased from single digits to over half, with proxy traffic on documentation sites reaching about 70% at one point.
The Vercel platform currently sees daily deployments of several million, with its AI gateway processing over a trillion tokens daily; the company's ARR has grown from about $100 million in early 2024 to higher levels, with proxies becoming a significant source of new business.
The platform needs to treat proxies as first-class users, including authentication, rate limiting, and audit paths; the proportion of direct human clicks and views is declining, while machine-generated and consumed traffic is on the rise.
Infrastructure providers benefit from the growth of proxy deployments and traffic, while advertising and content models that rely on direct human access are under pressure; documentation and interfaces optimized for proxies see higher usage rates.
Rauch publicly stated that proxies have taken over both production and consumption ends, which is beneficial for infrastructure businesses.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Guillermo Rauch has standardized front-end deployments through Next.js and Vercel, later launching AI SDKs, AI Gateways, and frameworks for proxies, allowing coding proxies to directly trigger deployments; he has publicly tracked the change in proxy proportions from single digits to over half, shifting the platform from serving human developers to also serving machines.
Vercel has made proxies the main subjects of deployment and browsing through default integrations and optimized documentation, shifting traffic and computational demands from human clicks to machine cycles, thereby amplifying infrastructure usage.
This contrasts with the historical path where search engine crawlers initially dominated traffic and later shifted to human browsing, and is also close to the current trend of coding proxies contributing code on platforms like GitHub; web infrastructure is in a transition phase from human-centric to proxy-centric.
This essentially represents a shift in user agency within technological substitution; as proxies take on both production and consumption roles, the proportion of direct human traffic declines, necessitating a redesign of identity, rate limiting, and content formats to cater to machines rather than browsers.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
When over 60% of deployments are triggered by proxies, platform users have shifted from humans to machines.
When 80% of document views come from proxies, content needs to be optimized for machines rather than humans.
When direct human traffic becomes negligible, infrastructure pricing is based on machine cycles.