CLOUDFLARE’S 2026 annual founders’ letter says the web is undergoing its biggest change since the company launched on 27 September 2010, driven particularly by AI-powered creation tools and autonomous agents. The company says the web plateaued, or even shrank by some measures, between 2012 and 2025, before website numbers surged in mid-2025. It attributes much of that growth not to low-quality “AI slop”, but to students, startups and other creators using “vibe coding” tools without traditional programming skills. More than 7 million developers are now building on Cloudflare’s developer platform, according to the company.
The letter also warns that automated web traffic is growing rapidly. Cloudflare had previously forecast that automated traffic would overtake human traffic in the second half of 2027, but says agents and AI crawlers brought that point forward to May 2026. If current trends continue, automated traffic could be 1,000 times human traffic within five years.
This creates costs for websites: an agent might inspect 1,000 restaurant menus before recommending one, leaving the other 999 to serve traffic without receiving business. Cloudflare says it is developing ways for crawlers to fetch only changed content, noting that more than half of good bots’ requests retrieve unchanged material. It is also offering publishers and application owners ways to be paid when agents use their content.
The company warns that agent-driven recommendations could favour established businesses, reducing opportunities for new entrants and increasing consolidation.