Cloudflare CEO: The Internet's Business Model Is Dead
episodePreviously titled “Cloudflare CEO: Bot Takeover, Edge AI & The Hard Decision Every CEO Will Face” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 2, 2026
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
We actually had bought traffic past human traffic online in the first half of twenty twenty six. In five years, you might have a thousand times as much traffic on the internet as you do today. In the next six to twelve months, almost every company is going to go through some exercise like this where they're gonna cut a bunch of their their team. The underlying business model of the internet for the last twenty eight years has remained Basically the same, which is it's largely advertising. The problem is bots don't click on ads. Over the next five years, the business model of the internet's gonna change radically.
Hi, I'm Matt Turk. Welcome to the Matt Podcast. Today I'm excited to welcome Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, one of the internet's most important companies that sits in front of a very large portion of global internet traffic. We start the conversation by unpacking a huge milestone. For the first time, the number of bots and AI agents has outnumbered humans on the internet. We also cover how Cloudflare has become an AI infrastructure. Infrastructure company and dig into Cloudflare workers, AI gateway, and agent security. We also don't shy away from some of the more controversial topics, including Cloudflare's recent decision to right-size its team to adapt to the new AI era. I should add that Matthew is a wonderful storyteller and he shares some truly wild and hilarious episodes from Cloudflare's journey, from scrappy startup to the massive public company it is today.
Please enjoy this fantastic video. A conversation with Matthew. I want to start with something that feels like a very crucial, important moment in the history of the internet. What you tweeted a couple of weeks ago and you said effectively that the number of bots and machines on the internet now outnumbers humans.
What milestone marked the moment bots overtook human traffic online?
So c can you unpack that and explain what that was?
Yeah, so I mean there have always been bots that ran around online. The way Google works is they scraped the internet and they uh then built their index based on that. Uh and historically throughout most of the history of clouds, about twenty percent of traffic on the internet was bots. And that held fairly consistent over a period of time until until about two years ago when we started to see a real rise in bots driven mainly by AI. And and the LLMs and everything that was going on uh behind those. And uh last fall, uh in the fall of 2025, I was asked at what point will automated traffic pass human traffic? And we pulled the data and we sort of extrapolated out uh the trends and and we thought that it was gonna be the end of 2027.
Uh fast forward to South by Southwest this year, March of 2026. And I was asked the same question again. And we looked at the data again and we're like, oh wow, it's growing a lot faster than we expected. It's moved now to the first half of 2027. Uh, and then I, you know, I was pretty shocked when my team uh came to me just a few weeks ago and they said, You won't believe it. Um, but we actually had bot traffic past human traffic online uh in the first half of 2026. So I think what that showed. shows is just how fast these different systems, again, almost all driven by AI, are growing and they're really driving so much more traffic across the internet.
And what was the denominator? Was it like a HTTP request?
Yeah, so so Cloudflare sits in front of, you know, a huge percentage of the internet.
How do we define “agents”, “bots”, and “crawlers” in today’s internet?
And so we and it's in a and a super representative sample. And uh and so as a result, we can always look at what are the general trends um across the internet. And we have a uh a site we call radar, if you go to radar.cloudflow.com, that's tracking a number of different things. And one of those is how much human traffic is there, how much bot traffic is there, and in in the last couple of months it it uh the the bot traffic exceeded the human traffic. And I and I I think that if you extrapolate this out, you know, in five years, I think you'll see a thousand times more bot traffic than human traffic. And if I had to take kind of an over-underbet on that, I'd take the overbet that it's just gonna it's it's growing at such an exponential rate uh that that you're just gonna see an enormous amount of the internet that's driven by by by these by these various bots and agents and other systems.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:45
2
What milestone marked the moment bots overtook human traffic online?
1:45–3:20
3
How do we define “agents”, “bots”, and “crawlers” in today’s internet?
3:20–4:53
4
Why does an AI agent visit thousands of sites for a single task?
4:53–6:27
5
How is the traditional click‑and‑ad business model of the web breaking?
6:27–8:12
6
What exactly does Cloudflare do to protect and accelerate web traffic?
8:12–10:45
7
How did Cloudflare’s early origin stories shape its security platform?
10:45–12:35
8
What are Cloudflare Workers, AI Gateway, and edge inference, and why do they matter?
12:35–1:28:07
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck
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