Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert: Humans Will Become Internet Rounding Errors
Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert stated during the quarterly earnings call that if current trends continue, non-human traffic will reach 1000 times human traffic within five years, making humans a rounding error on the internet.
Non-human traffic surpassed human traffic in May 2026, earlier than the company's previous prediction of 2027; the driving factor is AI agents, which can check 5000 sites on behalf of users, while a human shopper might visit only 5 sites, triggering thousands of requests with a single prompt.
This reinforces the narrative of infrastructure demand, with funding shifting towards CDNs and security services that can efficiently handle machine traffic and bot management, benefiting edge platforms like Cloudflare, while traditional content and intermediary models reliant on human ad clicks are under pressure.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Cloudflare, founded in 2009 by Matthew Prince and others, has continuously captured changes in internet traffic structure through its global edge network and bot management products. It has previously revised the timeline for non-human traffic surpassing human traffic, moving the prediction from the end of 2027 to the actual occurrence in May 2026, and has developed verification and charging mechanisms for AI agents.
The company's capital strategy focuses on converting the growth of machine traffic into revenue: investing in the Workers platform to attract nearly 2 million developers to build AI workloads, launching a digital wallet for AI agents to pay small fees per request, covering bandwidth and content costs. The strategy shifts from defensive bot interception to proactive service and monetization of machine traffic.
Similar cases can be seen in the early search engine crawlers dominating traffic, which gave rise to the SEO industry, and the expansion path of content delivery networks during the video streaming explosion. The current internet is in a transition phase from human interaction dominance to AI agent dominance, with edge computing and identity verification becoming new control points.
This is essentially a technological substitution: AI agents amplify a single human intent into thousands of machine requests, shifting the traffic generation mechanism from human clicks to algorithmic execution, leading to the failure of ad-dependent business models, and transferring pricing power for infrastructure to platforms that can identify, filter, and bill for machine traffic.
ABAB News · Law of Cognition
- The amplification factor of intent determines traffic dominance.
- Human speed remains constant, while machine speed rewrites the ratio.
- Infrastructure always gains pricing power before content.