Bots outnumber humans on the internet. That’s not a projection. Cloudflare Radar data shows automated traffic now accounts for roughly 58% of all HTTP requests worldwide, with real users generating just 42%. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said agentic AI programs browsing the web on behalf of assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini accelerated that shift by 18 months ahead of initial estimates.
Now Cloudflare, Mozilla, Google, Microsoft and Shopify have announced a joint protocol designed to tell humans and authorized bots apart without tracking anyone. It’s called PACT, or Private Access Control Tokens, and the group plans to submit it for formal standardization.
How PACT works
The concept is simple. A website that already knows a visitor’s identity issues an anonymous token. The browser stores that token and can present it to other websites as proof that a real person is behind the session. This reduces repeated verification checks across the web without requiring CAPTCHAs or mandatory logins.
The critical constraint: the token can’t be used to track users or reconstruct browsing history. It proves you’re human. It doesn’t say which human.
“The way we interact with the internet is changing fundamentally,” Dane Knecht, CTO of Cloudflare, said. “The existing tools for managing AI traffic are too broad.” The goal is eliminating friction for both humans and AI agents without compromising privacy.
This isn’t about blocking all bots
PACT doesn’t aim to shut down automated traffic entirely. Cloudflare itself has invested heavily in agentic AI and earlier this year cut 1,100 jobs, stating that AI agents now perform tasks previously handled by humans. The protocol’s purpose is distinguishing authorized agents from malicious scrapers and abuse bots.
Bobby Holley, CTO of Firefox at Mozilla, said an “avalanche of automated traffic” is pushing websites toward paywalls, identity checks and invasive tracking as their only defense. Shopify engineer Ilya Grigorik added that in e-commerce, every false positive in bot detection can turn a purchase into an abandoned cart.
Built on Apple’s existing work
PACT extends earlier infrastructure. Apple already uses a similar system called Privacy Pass, which relies on the device’s secure enclave. The IETF published the Privacy Pass architecture as RFC 9576, and PACT builds on that foundation with broader browser support and a specific focus on handling agentic AI traffic.
No implementation timeline has been announced. The partners committed to developing and standardizing the protocol, but deploying it across billions of browser sessions will take time.
