As the World Turns
This might be worse than I thought. Not only is AI going to take all of our jobs but AI is also going to waste all of our time.
The big story right now is that AI agents have officially overtaken humans as the largest source of internet traffic.
According to data just released by Cloudflare, automated AI bots and agents now account for 57.4% of all web traffic (via HTTP requests), leaving humans with the remaining 42.6%.
Here is what is happening under the hood:
The Multiplier Effect: When a human asks a chatbot a single question (like shopping for a camera or researching a topic), the human looks at maybe four or five sites. An AI agent will aggressively scour hundreds or thousands of websites simultaneously to synthesize that one answer.
The “Dead Internet” Shift: This marks a fundamental shift from a web designed for humans clicking around, to an internet dominated by machine-to-machine data retrieval.
The Regional Divide: This bot traffic is heavily concentrated in North America, where agents make up nearly 69% of all web traffic, while regions like India still remain overwhelmingly human-driven (over 84%).
While humans still win on total actual engagement time (like streaming videos or doomscrolling social feeds),
AI agents completely dominate the rapid-fire loading of web pages.
So while you are swiping left and right and up and down, the chat agents are doing stuff – lots of plain old boring businessey stuff.
By comparison, China’s power consumption ratio is 51% while the US ratio is a mere 17%. So the big guy’s got me there… Sorta.