In a September 26, 2026 conversation with Nilay Patel of The Verge, Cloudflare chief executive Matthew Prince outlined how artificial-intelligence systems are reshaping the public web. The interview formed part of a two-part series on the future of business, and focused on the surge of automated traffic that Cloudflare monitors.
Cloudflare’s data from June indicated that bots accounted for more than half of all internet requests, a share that has continued to rise as AI firms scrape content and autonomous agents act on behalf of users. Positioned between sites and these agents, the company offers owners the ability to block, permit, or monetize access, effectively turning traffic control into a potential revenue stream.
The rise of AI has also driven internal restructuring at Cloudflare. Earlier in the year the firm eliminated more than a thousand staff members, roughly twenty percent of its workforce. Prince later detailed the rationale in a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “How I choose which Cloudflare employees to replace with AI.”
Cloudflare operates a global network spanning more than 350 cities and thousands of data centers. Its platform accelerates content delivery, shields users from malicious activity, and supplies the infrastructure that lets developers scale applications to an internet-wide audience. Prince describes this as the fastest-growing segment of the business, reflecting the company’s expanding role in the digital ecosystem.
For three decades the internet’s primary revenue engine has been advertising, a model largely built by Google through search, DoubleClick acquisitions and tools such as Google Analytics. Prince argues that AI-generated traffic is upending this paradigm, prompting a reconsideration of how value is captured online. Cloudflare is therefore exploring new business structures that could accommodate paid access for automated agents while preserving a healthy web environment.
Prince predicts that automated traffic will overtake human visits in the second half of 2027. He noted that, within months of that forecast, internal measurements already showed non-human requests exceeding human ones. The shift marks a historic milestone, according to the CEO, for the way the internet is used.