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simonw 2 hours ago

"Cloudflare CEO is lying" is a bit of an aggressive take when he linked to the exact data so you can see it for yourself - and that's how this article was able to analyze it: https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic#bot-vs-human

Update: I see the problem. Here's the full tweet: https://x.com/eastdakota/status/2062212701414187452

"Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027, but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet's history."

But the quoted segment in the article was just "…bots passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet’s history."

It looks to me like the data supports "bots passed human traffic" but does NOT support "agentic traffic", since more of that traffic is from AI crawlers building indexes than from agents that are browsing the web on behalf of their owners.

If that's the point the article is trying to make then the headline is a little more supported, though I'd still say it's too hype-y a headline.

I guess a lot of this rests on what you assume "agentic traffic" to mean.

burnte 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's aggressive but true. Spam traffic exceeded real email back in 2003. He's not even in the right DECADE to declare a first for non-human traffic. It's pure marketing BS that is only remotely true if you accept the conditions he goes to lengths to hide.

simonw an hour ago | parent [-]

What lengths did he go to in order to hide them?

burnte 38 minutes ago | parent [-]

Misleading headline statement, no clarifying statements later that is restricted to HTTP traffic, graphs chosen to support the misleading message. Putting out the truth behind an asterisk isn't being honest.

JimDabell 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It looks to me like the data supports "bots passed human traffic"

I think you are missing the fact that the dashboard has HTML pre-selected as a filter. Once you change that to all content types, you’ll see humans account for twice as much traffic as bots.

Note this part of the article:

> The CEO ignored the all-traffic number, on his own dashboard, and instead published the HTML-only number as a fact about the whole internet.

simonw 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Personally I think that limiting the stats to just HTML pages is a credible stat on which you could claim that "bots passed human traffic". I don't care about bots downloading other types of content.

The most important thing is to link to your methodology, which Cloudflare's CEO did in this case.

JimDabell 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Contrast a human user with a naïve bot implementation when they come across an SPA. The human user will load the HTML once then fetch plenty of JSON as they use it. The bot will fetch the HTML and move on. If you filter by HTML only, then an extended human session lasting hours would be counted as equal to a bot immediately bouncing.

gonzalohm 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The graph only goes back to May 3rd 2026. I guess that was the start of humanity

throwaway678339 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The tweet implied there was a shift but for some reason radar is cutting off everything except recent data for just this one time series so we can't verify his storyline.