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

If you can’t monetize human attention, what do you monetize?

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 2023. The firms disagree on when the flip happened. Neither disagrees that it happened.