The infamous dead internet theory was originally a conspiracy that posited that the vast majority of the internet was run by bots and thinking machines. Most accounts you saw online were really bots masquerading as people — all part of some nefarious scheme to control humankind by keeping us isolated and divided.
That last part is far-fetched, but the core of the idea — that bots outnumber humans online — is inexorably starting to feel weirdly grounded. Fortune did a roundup of the latest data on the makeup of internet traffic, and most of it points to humans now being a quaint minority.
“There’s a lot of missing pieces of information, but a lot of the observed data suggests the same thing, which is like there is more bot activity,” Rudy Yang, a financial tech analyst at Pitchbook, told Fortune. “Agentic AI activity is driving a lot of the browser activity you’re seeing.”
This should come as no surprise. Bots have been everywhere on social media for a while now, and more and more people are wielding little posses of AI agents to do stuff on the internet on their behalf, ranging from conducting research to shopping. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman infamously said he was worried that the dead internet theory was coming true last year, seemingly without a shred of self-awareness.
