I’m sure you’ve seen the reports. The ones that say bot traffic is outnumbering human traffic on the internet. This is the Dead Internet Theory in action. But what does that mean for people going forward?
I don’t want this to spell the end of a human-created, human-friendly internet.
Welp, that happened faster than I predicted. 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. https://t.co/2zX5bHdhsa
— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) June 3, 2026
Why not let the internet fall?
I don’t think we should let the internet fall because it’s too good not to.
I’m thinking about all my remote and chronically unwell besties who have few opportunities to mingle in public. When I grew up in the 1990s, the public internet was a revolutionary way to connect with like-minded people around the world.
It can still be that for us, if we want it.
What people are saying about the state of the internet in 2026
News outlets are reporting that bot traffic is outnumbering human activity on the internet.
It’s a very fair assessment to say many webpage “hits” are from LLMs looking for training data, yes. However, such “page view” data doesn’t always take into account where a human is transacting with a business, or communicating with whom they were seeking.
To say that no “humans are really using the internet anymore” is hyperbolic.
Humans definitely are seeking humans on the internet. It’s just that we don’t always know about it. (For good reason, too! We don’t want CloudFlare or Google Analytics scanning every private message and how it led up to a friendship or sale, do we?)
Yup, bots wanna write for bots
Or more accurately, there is a boom of content for commercial intent.
Indeed, a large volume of this is to “hack an algorithm.” As put in this YouTube short by 404 Media: SEO firms aggressively post on Reddit to promote such things as vitamins and supplements. It’s gotten so bad that a Subreddit had to ban conversations about peptides because it was getting too spammy. (Here’s the full article on that, however you need to subscribe to unlock it.) Yeah man, that’s crap.
However, just because it seems like “this is what SEOs do” it doesn’t mean everyone is or should be marketing this way.
Okay, where do humans fit in?
There’s still definitely a place for human content made for humans.
We all know a commercial intent article when we see it: whether it’s spun up by a copywriter or AI. (And does a hybrid approach work when you write with AI? Maybe! Here’s how I’d approach it for a health service provider website.)
It’s unfortunate that the commercial intent content is what surfaces. But hey, how else do you explain why Google ranks recipe articles that are covered with banner ads? (It’s because Google gets paid when people see and click the ads.)
What do we do then?
We do what we can.
We talk to people in public, in DMs, and emails…
And we can start our own newsletters, too.
Conclusion: Is there a place for people on this “Dead Internet”
Absolutely. Just because a lot of what you see is commercial intent content, it doesn’t automatically mean “this is what participating on the internet or participating in SEO means.”
If you have something worth sharing, I think you owe it to the world to share it. So please keep creating! I’m here for you.