The infamous dead internet theory was originally a conspiracy that posited that the vast majority of the internet was run by bots and thinking machines. Most accounts you saw online were really bots masquerading as people — all part of some nefarious scheme to control humankind by keeping us isolated and divided.
That last part is far-fetched, but the core of the idea — that bots outnumber humans online — is inexorably starting to feel weirdly grounded. Fortune did a roundup of the latest data on the makeup of internet traffic, and most of it points to humans now being a quaint minority.
“There’s a lot of missing pieces of information, but a lot of the observed data suggests the same thing, which is like there is more bot activity,” Rudy Yang, a financial tech analyst at Pitchbook, told Fortune. “Agentic AI activity is driving a lot of the browser activity you’re seeing.”
This should come as no surprise. Bots have been everywhere on social media for a while now, and more and more people are wielding little posses of AI agents to do stuff on the internet on their behalf, ranging from conducting research to shopping. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman infamously said he was worried that the dead internet theory was coming true last year, seemingly without a shred of self-awareness.
Further corroborating this new paradigm, Cloudflare announced in June that 57 percent of webpage requests were being made by bots, marking the first time that bots made up the majority by its own metrics.
Bots have long been ubiquitous, but AI agents are doing the most to reshape the web. One report from the cybersecurity firm HUMAN found that traffic generated by AI agents surged by 7,851 percent year over year, Fortune noted. All those AI agents aren’t generating ad impressions, which is how a lot of websites keep the lights on, while putting a strain on those websites’ servers.
“They consume the web completely differently than humans do,” Yang told Fortune. “It’s almost like an entire new category, customer category, was created, and it means a lot for businesses because no one, as a business owner, is going to want to silo themselves from being able to serve a completely new customer segment.”
They’re also changing what we see on the web, too. A report published in October from the SEO firm Graphite found that over half of all new English-language articles on the internet were written with AI.
It hasn’t helped that Google, the internet’s de facto steward, has made a hard pivot towards making the internet less navigable by humans. Now, the focus is on having a chatbot to dredge up answers, instead of providing a list of links to websites they’d find in its search engine.
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