{"id":652291,"date":"2026-06-07T14:00:42","date_gmt":"2026-06-07T12:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=652291"},"modified":"2026-06-07T14:05:15","modified_gmt":"2026-06-07T12:05:15","slug":"south-africa-unique-on-the-internet-in-a-surprising-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/ai\/652291-south-africa-unique-on-the-internet-in-a-surprising-way.html","title":{"rendered":"South Africa unique on the Internet in a surprising way"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

People are still generating significantly more Internet traffic in South Africa than automated agents, which runs counter to global and continental averages, recent data from Cloudflare revealed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cloudflare, one of the world’s largest Internet infrastructure companies, reported that, for the first time ever, there was more bot traffic online than from humans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Asked how they defined agentic traffic, Cloudflare founder and CEO Matthew Prince said<\/a> that it included all forms of automated behaviour online.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Bot \/ Crawler \/ Agent are all synonyms depending on whether you want them to be a good or bad thing, normatively,” Prince stated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cloudflare’s data showed that 57.3% of all HTTP requests globally were now generated by bots, while humans accounted for only 42.7%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The trend was mirrored in Internet traffic figures across Africa, where Nigeria and South Africa accounted for the largest share at 21.6% each.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Cloudflare, Internet traffic in Africa was also dominated by bots, with 57.8% generated by them and only 42.2% by human users.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nigeria contributed enormously to this, with 81.2% of the country’s Internet traffic originating from automated agents, compared to just 18.8% from humans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That meant over 30% of all the continent’s bot traffic was hitting Nigeria, or nearly 1 out of every 3 automated bots operating in Africa interact with Nigerian infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, South Africa’s Internet was holding its own against the bot onslaught, with 65.5% of all Internet traffic generated by people, compared to 34.5% by bots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Egypt, which has the second-largest Internet traffic footprint on the continent, is faring better, as only 17.5% of its traffic was generated by automated agents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A May Statista report<\/a> found that the rise of malicious bot activity globally reflected a growing cybersecurity challenge for real Internet users and companies operating online.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Bad bots are increasingly used to steal login credentials, extract sensitive data, spread misinformation and manipulate digital advertising,” Statista data journalist Tristan Gaudiaut wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Industries such as e-commerce, finance and social media remain particularly exposed, with bot-driven fraud costing businesses billions each year.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Worldwide Internet traffic generated by humans and bots.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Bot vs Human Internet traffic in Africa.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Bot vs Human Internet traffic for South Africa.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

More bot traffic than human on the Internet<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Prince said that automated agents had surpassed humans on the Internet faster than he had originally predicted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027, but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet’s history,” he said in a post on X\/Twitter<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cloudflare is one of the most important companies on the web, providing content delivery network services and DDoS mitigation for some of the largest websites online.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Its data showed that at any point during a day, up to 62% of all Internet traffic could be coming from automated sources, including search crawlers and AI bots from companies like Google.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Cloudflare, the small island nation of Gibraltar ranked first in bot traffic, with 92.3% of all its Internet traffic generated by non-human AIs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was followed by Singapore at 76.2%, Iran at 75.7%, Ireland at 72.7%, and the Netherlands at 68.6%. These were the five countries most affected by bot web traffic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The country with the most overall web traffic was the United States, accounting for 29.4% of all Internet activity, followed by India at 5.4%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nigeria and South Africa ranked 30th and 31st for total web traffic, with both countries generating 0.7% of the globe’s online activity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cloudflare has confirmed that bots outnumber humans online for the first time ever, but not in South Africa. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341213,"featured_media":652292,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[92837],"tags":[27887,29694,20855,21905,105749,77178,37230,75],"class_list":["post-652291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-cloudflare","tag-http","tag-https","tag-internet-bots","tag-internet-traffic","tag-matthew-prince","tag-south-africa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652291"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341213"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=652291"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652291\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":652469,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652291\/revisions\/652469"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/652292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=652291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=652291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=652291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}