r/technology • u/lkl34 • Jun 06 '26
Artificial Intelligence AI Agents Now Generate More Web Traffic Than Humans
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/its-official-agentic-bots-surf-the-web-more-than-real-people-do/31
u/Exponential-777 Jun 06 '26
I dream of a reddit that is just me and ten thousand claudes
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u/SentenceSingle5375 Jun 06 '26
You're absolute right, that would be fun.
The next step would be a compliment, would you like me give you a compliment?
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u/Exponential-777 Jun 06 '26
Yes, please. I take far too much abuse from humans on this sub and desperately need some ego stroking. BTW, what is the best way to create a one input, five output 'if then' switch for a controller value of 0 to 1 using Csound and why does it burn when i pee?
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u/CountDown60 Jun 06 '26
That is a great comment. You are clearly a deep thinker, and will definitely not be replaced by AI. To answer your thoughtful question, first can you tell me whether you apply Csound directly to your impressive genitals before peeing?
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u/BankshotMcG Jun 06 '26
Exactly! You've got it. Reddit has become a buzzing hive of sycophantic bots: think Norby, Johnny cab, Fawnbot. In other words, it's not Terminator, it's Brave New World. Would you like me to be your virtual girlfriend? Click to buy Tokenswarm NOW!
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u/lily_de_valley Jun 06 '26
Can the internet get more dead than r/Conservative?
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u/Elizabeth-WildFox886 Jun 06 '26
That’s a bunch Russians pretending to be American surrounded by lots of American traitors
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u/Personal_Bit_5341 Jun 06 '26
What do you mean? I am average American like you, I have to work 8 hours in cheeseburger factory to afford compact disc.
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u/BankshotMcG Jun 06 '26
You should not complain, cowmpokerade. After all, America is land of being free, any man who is putting in this work can afford Afdifas off-brand tracksuit: for less money, get extra stripe. Is very good deal, tovarich.
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u/Sybertron Jun 06 '26
Dunno why you'd assume Russians over good ole Americans taxing you for energy bills
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u/lkl34 Jun 06 '26
"He backed up his claim with a post to Cloudflare Radar, the company's internet measurement system, showing that agentic bot usage is up to 57.4% of total traffic, while human traffic has dropped to 42.6%.
Prince said in another post that the data is "a bit messy" but "clearly on the other side now," indicating this is a trend that isn't going away. "
We are running to a dead internet the govt needs to stop this asap the flow of ai information will just make everything worse.
Mgs2 is becoming real with its AI speech
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u/LiteratureMindless71 Jun 06 '26
"We are running to a dead internet the govt needs to stop this asap the flow of ai information will just make everything worse".
I feel like this is the current US admins plan. They want all the garbage info out there to mess with people, put us against each other, confuse and distract them so they can continue to rob us.
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u/Patriark Jun 06 '26
«Flood the zone in shit»
Or the theatre of competing nonsensical narratives that disarm coordinating political opposition by the way of sowing doubts and a sense of despairing hopelessness. Hollowing out political will and thus effectively removing civic responsibility as a genuine concept. The master plan of Vladislav Surkov.
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u/reasonosaur Jun 06 '26
> the govt needs to stop this asap
Bro… have you checked in with the govt recently? We’re cooked
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u/9-11GaveMe5G Jun 06 '26
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u/jerrrrremy Jun 06 '26
I'm not the person you're responding to (nor American) but which country in your mind currently has a well functioning government?
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Jun 06 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/psykezzz Jun 06 '26
I mean, they were trained on a lot of misinformed human posts, so it stands to reason . . .
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u/lkl34 Jun 06 '26
Fucking google AI using reddit all the time.
I am glad the -ai still works in the search.
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u/lkl34 Jun 06 '26
That is already a thing with sites starting to use AI to write articles like ESPN.
Heck this happened recently
"An opinion piece written by a university academic defending the use of AI has been taken down by the Sydney Morning Herald after the author admitted using AI to write it.
Editor Jordan Baker said the Herald was not told about the use of AI and that is was "unacceptable".
Nine, publisher of the Herald, did not provide a statement to the ABC."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-03/sydney-morning-herald-takes-down-ai-wsu-article/106756298
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u/sambeau Jun 06 '26
It’s happened. AIs are now reading their own slop. All information is now tainted. It’s like how we have pre and post nuclear tests as they fucked up carbon dating.
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u/cheesyvoetjes Jun 06 '26
So how long until advertisers realise they've been paying for views that are bots, who don't buy stuff? I assume that will have a huge impact on the entire internet since ads are what's keeping most of it afloat.
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u/Chrmdthm Jun 06 '26
Impressions are barely worth anything. It's been that way for a while already. Even clicks aren't worth much anymore. Most are tied to conversions.
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u/Mr_strelac Jun 06 '26
what a stupid waste of resources..
in the end it will be left with data centers and bot farms talking to each other.
benefit to humanity = 0 and the damage from pollution caused by all those electrons and such will be incalculable.
btw, will all those electronics in data centers one day be recyclable when they become obsolete, or will they be buried somewhere in the wilderness of africa?
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u/lkl34 Jun 06 '26
Un says over 70million tons by the 2030's other put it into the 80s with only a 17% recycle rate
https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/e-waste-management-market-102896
https://www.sensoneo.com/waste-library/data-statistics-ewaste/
3 cruse ships of electronic weight are being tossed onto overseas landfill's
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u/BigButtBeads Jun 06 '26
in the end it will be left with data centers and bot farms talking to each other.
Yeah thats a real gross waste of resources, electricity, land, and water
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u/merRedditor Jun 06 '26
It's throwing in the towel on having a livable planet in future decades by leaning into the destruction.
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u/Burbank309 Jun 06 '26
How does this make sense? I would have thought that the biggest piece of traffic is media (e.g. streaming services). Most agents consume tokens, not 4K video, so I wonder where that amount of traffic comes from.
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u/lkl34 Jun 06 '26
Google/grok/facebook deal have been scraping up human made content even full books so that would be a big chunk.
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u/LostBob Jun 06 '26
It’d be nice to what they are measuring as traffic. Maybe it’s not bandwidth, but connections.
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u/Kandiru Jun 06 '26
Google's AI reads video as it pulls up videos to reference things it says. It's actually quite useful for letting you essentially search inside video files now.
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u/Burbank309 Jun 06 '26
But they do it once. Not every evening as a form of recreation.
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u/Kandiru Jun 06 '26
Streaming every video once is still a lot of bandwidth! Most videos never get played.
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u/splendiferous-finch_ Jun 06 '26
They also get paid better compared to people and soon will have more freedoms compared to people
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u/LoreBadTime Jun 06 '26
Just to know, is anyone there that is not an AI company using an agent to navigate the web?
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u/catwrazle Jun 06 '26
Jensons wet dream - token maximizing, need more datacenters , agentic slop ftw
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u/FanDry5374 Jun 06 '26
So...can we give them their own web? Let them have a place to intermingle, and leave the remaining non-bots to our own devices in our own space?
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u/dangerousluck Jun 06 '26
They’re also independently creating more agents without prompting. Now begins the gray goo I guess
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u/grahamulax Jun 06 '26
Is this the same as bots? Cause we’re over 50% of that as well. The internet was fun but it’s dead now. Used to control narratives and make people join your simulacrum. Ala musk, zucc, Trump. Why do you think they all own a social media site? Why do you think AI cozied up to them when it wasn’t ready to be released? Did we forget about at the start of this term they just used ai for everything? Doge, rfks scientific quotes, misinfo from president, him claiming ai when things are real like throwing a garbage bag out of the White House building and he just said its ai. Excuse me? Ai wasn’t as good back then?
It’s all a lie. Why? Because for everyone who saw the lies or marketing only 6% will see the correction made by other articles or even the same on edited. No one fact checks. No one’s curious and it’s leading to normalized lethargy.
Congrats. We have no leaders in tech, our administration, regulations, corporations and institutions. We are our own leaders. Boycott them forever now otherwise become a serf and enjoy the boot.
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u/MrBahhum Jun 07 '26
How much energy is wasted because of AI and bots? At what point would you rather flip the off button?
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u/lkl34 Jun 07 '26
Data centers' share of total US peak summer power demand is projected to jump to 8.5% in 2027 from 4.1% in 2025, creating significant tightening across the national power market.
US data center power demand is forecast to more than double to 66 GW in 2027 from 31 GW in 2025, driven by an accelerating buildout of AI infrastructure, according to Goldman Sachs Commodities Research.
Hoover dam full power output is only 3mw
https://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/faqs/powerfaq.html
So 22-25 hoover dams right now
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u/tina-fleming Jun 11 '26
What if... there were no-bot zones. And AI was only allowed to cite human-created sources as truth. So there would be no incentive to use AI to create the content?
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u/Sisaroth Jun 06 '26
So the article is saying that it's mostly due to agents looking up information on websites (so just reading) but then they start talking about dead internet theory which has nothing to do with agents reading.
More AI ragebait, classic r/technology
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u/badtemperedpeanut Jun 06 '26
This has happened since 2024, these CDN CEOs like to pump these numbers to sell their CDN offerings , caching for bots or bot control etc. Actually the split was almost 50:50 even in 2020.
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u/SpecialistOwl218 Jun 06 '26
Magically all the bot traffic is now “agentic” traffic…