Cloudflare’s 2026 Annual Founders’ Letter
Cloudflare published its 2026 Annual Founders' Letter this week to mark the company's 16th birthday, dating its launch to September 27, 2010. The letter, signed by Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn, describes an Internet changing more than at any point since the company started.
Cloudflare reports that the web's growth plateaued or even shrank from 2012 through 2025, then changed in mid-2025 with an explosion of new websites. It attributes the increase mainly not to AI "slop" but to a new cohort of creators without coding skills using "vibe coding" tools, the majority of which the company says deploy to Cloudflare's developer platform. More than 7 million developers now build on that platform.
On traffic, Cloudflare says it originally forecast automated traffic would pass human traffic in the second half of 2027, but agents and AI crawlers pulled that date forward to May 2026. If current trends continue, it says automated traffic will be 1,000 times human traffic in five years, driven by agent traffic growth rather than a decline in human traffic.
The letter describes a cost problem: an agent asked for a lunch recommendation might survey 1,000 restaurant menus and pick one, leaving the other 999 to serve the agent without return, a tragedy of the commons in Cloudflare's framing. It warns agents favor whoever has been around longest, potentially making it harder for new entrants and leading to consolidation. The company says more than half of what good bots fetch has not changed since their last visit, and that it has been working so crawlers see more of the web while fetching only what is new.
Cloudflare also says it is giving anyone who puts content or applications online a way to get paid when agents use their work, and that it will announce partnerships this week.
Why it matters: Developers and site owners face more agent-driven traffic, and Cloudflare says it is changing crawling to reduce load on sites and offering a payment path for content and applications used by agents.
Based on reporting from the original publisher. Visit the source for full context and later updates.
Publisher excerpt
The Internet is changing more today than at any point since Cloudflare launched back on September 27, 2010. As automated traffic surpasses human activity, we reflect on the rise of AI agents, new creators, and how we can help build a fair, sustainable future for the web.