For years, Cloudflare (NET) was easy to explain.
It helped websites load faster, blocked cyberattacks, and kept internet traffic moving
In the era of artificial intelligence, that description sounds outdated. Cloudflare’s second-quarter revenue climbed 36% year over year to $696.1 million, while large customers paying more than $100,000 annually increased to 4,698, up roughly 27% from a year earlier. The company also raised its full-year revenue outlook to between $2.864 billion and $2.87 billion, helping send shares sharply higher after earnings.
The greater story is why. The internet is starting to move away from humans browsing and toward machine-to-machine activity from autonomous AI bots, according to Cloudflare. Such agents crawl websites, question APIs, retrieve information, and increasingly make transactions without a human manually browsing through pages.