News / Infrastructure, Cloud & Telecom
AI disrupts the web’s balance: growth in websites and challenges for new players Published on 27 September 2026 by Christ-loisele (2 min read)
Cloudflare’s 2026 annual report reveals that AI accelerates website creation but increases automated traffic, with a shift expected as early as May 2026. Intelligent agents could also marginalize startups in favor of established giants, according to the company’s internal data.
An unexpected web rebound after a decade of stagnation
Cloudflare highlights in its founders’ letter, published on September 27, 2026, that the web experienced a period of plateau, or even decline, between 2012 and 2025, according to certain metrics. Yet, starting in mid-2025, an explosion of new sites was observed, driven in part by the rise of accessible development tools. Over 7 million developers now use Cloudflare’s developer platform , a sign of this technical democratization.
AI agents could generate traffic 1,000 times greater than that of human users in five years, according to Cloudflare’s internal data
Illustration: Lawing Tech Automated traffic dominates in 2026, far earlier than expected
The publisher had initially projected that bot- and AI-generated traffic would surpass human traffic by mid-2027. This forecast has been revised to May 2026, nearly a year earlier. According to Cloudflare, AI agents could even produce traffic 1,000 times greater than that of human users within five years, starting in 2026. Some of this traffic is redundant: over half of the data retrieved by good bots has not changed since their last visit, the company reveals.
AI agents: an advantage for giants, a risk for innovation
AI agents explore the web in ways similar to traditional search engines, but their volume and behavior could favor already established players. Cloudflare fears they may make it harder to discover new entrants , by prioritizing the most visited or bot-optimized sites. This dynamic could worsen a ‘tragedy of the commons’ scenario: the costs borne by visited sites (bandwidth, server resources) would not be offset by revenue from automated traffic.
What this means here
For businesses and government agencies in Benin and West Africa, this transformation could accelerate the digitization of local SMEs through tools like vibe coding , enabling non-developers to create applications without advanced technical skills. However, emerging entities must prepare for increased competition from digital giants , whose sites would benefit from AI-favored automated traffic.
Public institutions, such as ministries or local governments, could also see their infrastructure costs rise if their traffic is mostly generated by bots, without financial compensation. Cloudflare is working on solutions to limit redundant requests, a path local players could follow to optimize costs.
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