The “Dead Internet Theory” once sounded like an online conspiracy. Today, parts of it are beginning to look surprisingly plausible.
A recent Fast Company column explored the idea that much of today’s internet activity is no longer generated by people, but by bots, AI agents, automated crawlers, and other machines. Cloudflare, which manages traffic across millions of websites, reports that bots now account for 57.5% of web page requests—crossing a threshold its CEO had previously predicted wouldn’t arrive until the end of 2027.
Other technology observers argue machines actually became the majority online as early as 2023.
The exact date may be less important than the larger conclusion: machines increasingly dominate activity across an internet originally built for humans.
In this episode of TechMobility Topics, I examine the Dead Internet Theory, what the explosive growth of AI-generated traffic means for the web, and a much bigger question: If bots and AI agents increasingly communicate, search, create, and consume information on our behalf, what happens to the humans the internet was supposed to connect?
