Most Internet traffic is now 'non-human'

On their blog, Cloudflare report that a new online milestone has recently been passed:

This year, agent traffic crossed a historic threshold for the first time: more than 50% of traffic on the Internet is now non-human.

As they say:

This shift has staggering implications for publishers, content owners, and the future of the open web.

Predictably, much of the bot crawling is for the purposes of training AI rather than the “traditional reasons” of creating search engines and other content disovery products. As such, the “return” of visitors per page to crawls ratio has plummeted from around 1:6 to 1:10.

This chart of where humans spend their time when online is also rather stark. And upsetting for those of us who value a free, open, diverse and unsiloed web.

I’d have liked them to split up social and AI for the 2024 entry, but either way, they’re a combination of technologies from massive companies that are silos desperate to trap people within their own profit-seeking limits.