Cloudflare says most internet traffic is now automated

Cloudflare ↗ 5.57% used its 16th Birthday Week to unveil a suite of products designed for what it calls the Internet's "second audience" — AI agents — revealing that daily requests from agents on its network have grown by more than 1,700% over the past year and that, for the first time, more than half of all traffic on its network is now automated.cloudflare+1

The company, which handles 115 million HTTP requests per second on average, up from 63 million at the end of 2024, published the figures in a blog post titled "The Internet has a second audience" on Wednesday. The announcements span monetization, security, developer tooling, and content controls, all centered on the premise that businesses must now serve software visitors alongside human ones.cloudflare

Monetization and Content Controls

Among the headline releases is the Monetization Gateway, a closed beta that lets eligible U.S. customers put a price on any resource passing through Cloudflare's network — web pages, APIs, datasets, or MCP tools — using the open x402 protocol. When a rule matches, Cloudflare returns an HTTP 402 Payment Required response, and the agent pays the seller directly. Thousands of sellers joined the waitlist after its initial announcement in June, with the most common request being "charge agents, not humans".cloudflare+1

A companion product, Pay Per Use, targets publishers who will never land bespoke licensing deals with AI companies. Rather than charging for the crawl itself, it pays when content is actually used, with every buyer operating as a verified crawler. The company also shipped Disallow AI Training on September 15, which keeps sites indexed for search while instructing crawlers not to use the data for model training, with Apple ↘ 1.11%, Google Alphabet Inc. ↗ 0.87%, and Microsoft ↗ 2.38% committing to honor it.cloudflare

Security and Developer Tools

On the security side, Cloudflare opened its Threat Events Platform to every account at no charge and released Threat Signals, a set of AI-driven tools that parse open-source threat intelligence feeds, extract indicators of compromise, and store them as tagged events for up to 30 days. Paid enterprise tiers get additional feeds, proprietary datasets, and custom WAF rules.ppc+1

Application Profiles, also announced during Birthday Week, add a positive-security layer to Cloudflare's web application firewall by learning what valid requests look like and flagging deviations. The feature is aimed at reducing attack surface as AI makes it easier for adversaries to generate novel payloads.cloudflare+1

The Broader Bet

The week's releases reflect a broader strategic shift. Some of the most heavily crawled website categories — including retail, software, and financial services — have seen human traffic decline by as much as 40% in less than one year, according to the company. Cloudflare's founders wrote in their annual letter that if current trends hold, automated traffic could reach 1,000 times human traffic within five years.cloudflare+1

"The old deal is gone, and the new one is still being written," Cloudflare's blog post concluded. "Together we can shape what happens next."cloudflare