Cloudflare's 2026 Annual Founders' Letter

Cloudflare’s founders’ letter puts a date on something we all felt coming: automated traffic passed human traffic in May 2026, more than a year earlier than they forecast, and they expect bots at 1,000x human traffic within five years. The number I’d actually act on is smaller: over half of what well-behaved crawlers fetch hasn’t changed since their last visit. That’s a caching and conditional-request problem before it’s a policy one.