Episode 3 — Bots now outnumber humans on the internet. Is business ready?

This month, for the first time in internet history, bot traffic exceeded human web traffic. Cloudflare reports 57.4% of requests are now automated. The Cloudflare CEO said it happened two years faster than he predicted.

The tech press asked whether this was good or bad for the internet. That's the wrong question for any business with a website.

The right question: is your content strategy built for this new reality? Almost certainly not. When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity for a product recommendation, those systems don't return a list of links — they make a direct judgment about what the answer is. If you're not in that answer, you don't get a second chance.

This episode covers what the 57.4% stat actually means for businesses (not all bot traffic is equal — the piece that matters is LLM crawlers operating on behalf of human users); Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) and the signals that now matter — factual density, clear entity associations, third-party citation, structured data; the robots.txt decision most businesses are getting wrong (blocking training crawlers and inference crawlers are very different things); and the honest case for waiting, and why the urgency is real anyway.

The decisions aren't theoretical. They're happening whether you make them deliberately or not.

Chapters: 00:00 The take · 01:00 What 57.4% means for your business · 04:00 GEO: the new discipline nobody's taking seriously · 07:00 The robots.txt decision you're probably getting wrong · 10:00 The case for waiting · 14:00 Why the urgency is real anyway