The ‘dead internet theory’ is real. And it’s killing the web as we know it

Sometime in June of 2026, without ceremony, human beings became a minority on the internet they built. Cloudflare, which manages traffic for millions of websites, reported that bots now generate 57.5% of web page requests. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince had predicted in March that the crossover wouldn’t happen until the end of 2027. It arrived more than a year early. Global defense and technology leader Thales, in its annual “Bad Bot Report,” argues that machines became the majority back in...