Most Web Traffic Isn’t Human Anymore. Top Investors Say Stores Must Start Selling to Bots

For about 25 years, the fight on the internet was simple. Websites wanted people and hated bots. Bots scraped prices, hoarded concert tickets, filled out fake signups and tried stolen card numbers. Every captcha you ever clicked, every “select all the traffic lights” puzzle, exists because companies were trying to keep machines out.

One of the biggest investment firms in Silicon Valley now says that fight is over, and the bots won the traffic war. In an essay posted Tuesday, Andreessen Horowitz partners Olivia Moore and Justine Moore opened with a line that’s hard to forget: “The primary users of the Internet are no longer human. They’re AI agents.”

Their claim goes further than traffic. The firm says agents “now make up the majority of web traffic, write more than half of new articles published online, and generate most of the code pushed to production.” The essay is called “Welcome to the B2A Economy,” for business-to-agent, and its point is about money. As SI helpers stop answering questions and start finishing tasks, the Moores wrote, “they’ll increasingly decide which products to use, which services to subscribe to, and where to spend money on our behalf.”

Justine Moore put the whole argument in two sentences on her own account.

The numbers they can point to, and the one they can’t

Here’s where a careful reader should slow down. The headline claim, that agents make up most web traffic, has no source in the essay. The firm doesn’t say who measured it, how, or whether it counts the simple crawlers and scrapers that have been a big share of web traffic for years. Treat it as the firm’s read of the market, not a measurement.

The figures they do cite come from companies that track this stuff for a living. Shopify reported that SI-driven traffic to its stores grew eightfold year over year in the first quarter of 2026, while orders coming from SI-powered searches grew nearly thirteenfold. Human Security, a company that sells bot detection, saw traffic from agent-run browsers grow 8x between August and October alone. An agent app called Muse drove about 60% of that activity, and OpenAI’s products made up a combined 30%.

The coding world is further along. As of September, more than 40% of pull requests on GitHub, the proposed code changes programmers submit, started with an agent’s draft, the essay says. Six months earlier it was 17%. Database company Supabase said in June that more than 60% of its new databases are launched by SI tools. Stripe, the payments company, said agents made up nearly 40% of the traffic to its documentation. Vercel, which hosts websites, said deployments triggered by agents rose 28 times over the past year.

“Fewer than 1% of the global workforce is developers,” the Moores wrote. “What happens when the other 99% starts using agents?”

Your SI helper as the shopper

For a regular person, the shift looks like this. Today you ask ChatGPT what vacuum to buy, then you go buy it. Next, you tell an agent to buy a good vacuum under $300, and it picks the store, the brand and the shipping. Whoever the agent trusts gets the sale.

The firm says that’s already happening in small ways. Its partners asked ChatGPT to make and edit a video ad using plugins from three different apps. The assistant coordinated the work across all three, and then it “upsold us on a Descript paid plan to get the video done.” Justine Moore described a similar test with OpenAI’s Codex, which pitched them a paid subscription while helping make a TV ad.

That’s the part worth sitting with. An SI that can recommend a paid upgrade is also an SI that can be paid to recommend one. The essay says SI-referred shoppers convert to sales better than regular visitors and bounce less, which is exactly why every business will want to be the one the agent picks. Earlier this week OpenAI started letting businesses claim their own page inside ChatGPT, with product feeds and data on how users interact with them.

Not everybody is opening the door

The essay admits most big companies are still blocking agent traffic “due to concerns about fraud and chargebacks.” That’s not paranoia. A bot that can buy a plane ticket for you can also buy a hundred of them with a stolen card, and when something goes wrong, nobody’s sure who’s on the hook: you, the SI company, or the store.

We just saw that tension play out. United became the first U.S. airline to block SI bots from booking flights on its site. The airline wants people booking through its own app and site, where it controls the price, the seat and the customer. The Moores are betting companies like United eventually give in, because the agents will be where the customers are. United is betting it can keep the customer relationship for itself.

The firm also says the plumbing isn’t ready. Payments, fraud checks, identity and even basic communication like email and texting are already straining at what it calls “fairly low agent volume.” Right now most agents get things done the clumsy way, by taking over a browser and clicking around a website like a person would. The faster route, the firm says, is plugins and connectors that let an agent talk directly to a store’s systems.

Keep in mind who’s talking. Andreessen Horowitz invests in SI companies, and the essay’s market map is full of startups that would love for this thesis to be true. ChatGPT alone has 1.2 billion weekly users, by the firm’s count, so the opportunity is real. But when an investor tells you the future belongs to the kind of company it owns, it’s fair to check the math yourself.

The Moores say this is the first piece in a series, with more coming on how agents decide where to send your money and what still stops them from finishing a purchase. Those answers matter more than the traffic number. A bot that browses is a nuisance. A bot that spends is a customer, and soon it may be spending yours.