Matthew Prince

The internet for a long time was growing like crazy.

And then it kind of stalled out for the last little bit.

And the number of new websites that were being created, number of new domains, kind of plateaued from about 2012, 2011, 2012, until actually quite recently.

What's changed is,

I think that because a lot of these tools have allowed more people to be creators, to be coders, to be developers, actually for the first time in really the last 15 years, the number of websites that are being created, the number of new things that are happening is actually growing again and growing at rates that look like what the early 2000s growth rates of the internet looked like.

So I actually think that's kind of optimistic that there's more things that are being created that are out there and are coming online.

Yeah, you know, I think that based on what we've seen, we were saying it was 2027.

We're now saying it's the first half of 2027 that that will cross.

It's just been extraordinary to watch the growth of agentic traffic, bot traffic over the last little bit.

And for a long time, bots were bad.

But you increasingly are seeing these agents, which are actually helping humans, trying to do things which are really useful, just driving an enormous amount of traffic.

And I think any of us who have used any of these AI tools can see how that happens.

If I'm personally going to go think about buying a new digital camera,

I might go to a site or two, a few pages that are out there, and then I'll make a decision.

Someone who's maybe more thorough than I might go to five sites and compare reviews.

The agents, you can just watch it as you ask a chat GPT or a grok or a clod to do work on your behalf.

They're taking oftentimes a thousand times more time

in-depth research, and that means there's just a lot more traffic that is hitting the internet.

In terms of whether the internet's ready, I think that's a little bit of an open question.

I think one of the challenges, you know, from a technical perspective, I think we can manage that and we can scale through it.