Three months on, I spoke at length with Bruce Nash, founder and CEO of The Numbers, about what happened. Within his tale are a number of things that should worry anyone who runs, relies on, or simply appreciates the internet. Over the past couple of years, website owners the world over have seen their web traffic change. By 2024, automated traffic had surpassed human traffic, and just last month, Cloudflare announced that bots had reached 57.5% of web page requests. The team scrambled to understand what had happened, initially assuming it was the sheer weight of AI traffic.