Traffic to websites from AI agents and bots has eclipsed human-generated web traffic for the first time, marking a landmark in AI’s progress and impact earlier than expected.The rise is attributed to the continued growth of AI agents, largely autonomous programs that use tools that collaborate with high-level programs and data, with little human feedback.Humans might browse five websites before making a purchase, however, an AI service might browse 5,000 websites. This increase in search requests explains how online bot traffic jumped to over 55%, surpassing human-generated traffic.In response to the news, some commenters have brought up the “dead internet theory” — the idea that with the rise of AI, the internet will largely be composed of bots interacting with one another, and that humans and their content will largely be rendered irrelevant. Prince says he thinks the growing use of AI actually is proving the theory wrong. Will bots render human activities on the internet “useless” ?

