Cloudflare marked its 16th birthday this week with its annual founders' letter, arguing that the Internet is changing faster than at any point since the company launched on September 27, 2010. The letter frames that change as both a source of risk and reason for optimism, and puts two shifts at the center: the return of web growth and the rapid rise of automated traffic.
A new cohort of builders
Between 2012 and 2025 the web plateaued by most measures, and by some it even shrank. That pattern broke in mid-2025 with an explosion of new websites. The common explanation — AI "slop" — accounts for only part of what Cloudflare observes. More significant, in the company's account, is a new cohort of creators with ideas but no coding skills, enabled by "vibe coding" tools. Cloudflare says the majority of those tools deploy to its developer platform, which now hosts more than 7 million developers. The letter points to students building apps for real-world problems and startups getting off the ground in record time.
Cloudflare originally forecast that automated traffic would overtake human traffic in the second half of 2027. Agents and AI crawlers pulled that date forward to May 2026. If current trends hold — which the letter calls, if anything, a conservative assumption — automated traffic will reach 1,000 times human traffic within five years. The projection rests on agent traffic exploding, not on any expected decline in human traffic.
The appeal of agents is easy to see: asked to find a flight, a contractor or a cheaper phone plan, an agent can read more pages in a minute than a person could in an afternoon. But that legwork carries a cost. An agent asked to pick a lunch spot might survey 1,000 restaurant menus to recommend one. Only one restaurant gets the business; the other 999 absorb the load of serving the agent for nothing. Cloudflare describes the resulting risk as a tragedy of the commons, in which the users who benefit from agent traffic don't bear the costs it imposes and therefore have no reason to restrain it.
Why discovery — and competition — are at stake
The same dynamic threatens how new products get found. Small businesses win customers through emotion or convenience: the deli where the counter staff knows your name, the store on your drive home that doesn't have the best selection or prices. An agent is indifferent to both. It picks whatever it has the most information about, which usually means whoever has been around the longest. As agents take over more commerce, Cloudflare argues, new entrants will struggle to break in, leading to consolidation and a less robust business environment.
The letter invokes Cloudflare's own entry: launching on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt with engineers in the audience fixing bugs — eight remaining when the founders walked on, all resolved by the time they walked off, with the service live in five data centers on three continents. No agent would have recommended them. People took a chance anyway, and the company wants the next new entrants to get the same chance.
The stated goal is a future with 500,000 AI companies rather than five, one where creators can reach a global audience and get paid rather than wither, and one where new entrants with better products can win instead of a few mega corporations winning by default. Last year's letter addressed what AI was doing to publishers; this year, the letter says, the same shift has reached the restaurant and the deli. What replaces the Internet's old business model is, in Cloudflare's framing, the most interesting question of the next five years.
Presents for the 999 restaurants
Cloudflare's birthday announcements target both halves of the problem. Agents crawl the way search engines always have — fetching everything repeatedly whether or not it changed — and Cloudflare's data suggests more than half of what good bots fetch hasn't changed since their last visit. The company says it has been working so crawlers see more of the web while fetching only what's new, reducing load on crawled sites. It is also giving anyone who publishes content or applications online a way to get paid when agents use what they've built.
Cloudflare's mission, the letter states, isn't to build a better Internet but to help build one, which it says it cannot do alone — hence partnerships with companies and organizations that share its goals. Those announcements are expected this week.
