Cloudflare's chief financial officer Thomas Seifert has predicted that non-human, machine-generated internet traffic will grow to be 1,000 times greater than human traffic within five years, effectively making people's browsing a "rounding error" on the internet. He made the claim during Cloudflare's Q2 earnings call, noting the firm's own tracking already got an earlier forecast wrong: it had expected machine traffic to overtake human traffic in 2027, but this actually happened in May 2026. The trend, driven by AI systems, matters because it points to a rapidly changing internet where infrastructure providers like Cloudflare must adapt to handle vastly greater automated demand and associated security risks.

Seifert stressed that human traffic itself is not shrinking, but is simply being dwarfed by the pace of machine growth, and said this would require greater efficiency, which he suggested Cloudflare could provide. The company reported $696 million in quarterly revenue, up 36 percent year-on-year, though losses more than tripled to $205.7 million; investors were reassured by the growth and a record number of large customer sign-ups. CEO Matthew Prince also highlighted the firm's comparatively low capital expenditure, forecast at 14–15 percent of revenue (around $430 million), and used this to contrast Cloudflare's approach with rivals, arguing that hyperscalers sell underused server capacity while Cloudflare focuses on maximising output from existing equipment.