At Connect 2026, Cloudflare said AI agents will favor the businesses they know most about, and showed products that help those businesses get found, get paid, and run their software on its network.

The restaurant that loses the lunch order still pays to answer the agent that picked a competitor. Matthew Prince, co-founder and chief executive of Cloudflare, laid out that math in the opening keynote at Connect 2026 in San Francisco on October 20: an agent asked for a lunch spot reads the sites of thousands of venues, and one of them wins the visit.

The audience that Prince described has grown to more than 10 million developers building on Cloudflare, a figure he opened with. The scale behind the worry comes from Cloudflare's own measurements. Cloudflare Radar data reported by HotHardware puts automated requests at 57.5 percent of page requests, a count that says nothing about time spent (Leong, 2026). Prince told the audience he expects agent traffic to reach a thousand times human traffic within five years, and that his earlier forecasts have run too conservative (Cloudflare, 2026). Matt Conroy, who presented Cloudflare's controls for agent traffic, said agents made more than 600 billion requests on the network last quarter, close to four times the level at the end of 2025 (Cloudflare, 2026).

Agents choose by information volume, and that favors the largest names

Prince offered two reasons people shop at small businesses: the deli owner who remembers your name and the dry cleaner on the route home. An agent is not swayed by emotion. His slide showed one asked for lunch near me, ranking three options with the one tagged “Most info” on top.

If new entrants cannot get picked, Prince argued, business consolidates behind the companies agents already know. He tied it to Cloudflare's own start. The company launched in 2010 with five data centers on three continents and, by Prince's count, 27 bugs still open as the founders began presenting, a launch no agent would have recommended.

Cloudflare's first answer to discovery is a tool for agent engine optimization. It asks leading artificial intelligence assistants the questions your customers ask, then shows how you compare with competitors and which sites shape the answer. Conroy said the goal by early next year is to give businesses a bigger say in how their content shows up in AI answers.

Cloudflare sits on both sides of the market it describes

Stephanie Cohen, Cloudflare's chief strategy officer, told the audience that more than one in five websites on the internet uses Cloudflare (Cloudflare, 2026). That puts the company in view of buyers and sellers at the same time.

Conroy described an experiment with OpenAI. Using one percent of its network, Cloudflare helped the company find and index hundreds of millions of web addresses it had never seen, and Conroy pointed to small sites and local businesses as the beneficiaries (Cloudflare, 2026).

The same position supports the commercial tools. The Monetization Gateway lets a business price a web page, a dataset, an application programming interface, or a Model Context Protocol tool. An agent that asks for a resource receives a price first and gets the response after it pays. In September, Fortune reported the gateway in closed beta for eligible U.S. buyers and sellers.

Mastercard chief product officer Jorn Lambert presented the payment half with a live demonstration. An agent worked inside a $3.50 spending limit set by a smart contract and bought services from sellers that answered each request with a 402 payment-required response. The sellers settled the batch afterward, and the transfer showed up on a public blockchain.

A business that adopts these tools gets an agent-facing storefront without building payment or identity systems. Its pricing and access rules then live on Cloudflare's network, which suits companies without payment engineering teams.

Most agent traffic does not identify itself, so Cloudflare has to work out who is asking

Conroy reduced control to a question of who is asking and on whose behalf. Many AI companies sign their agents' requests, and OpenAI is among them. Fewer than one in ten automated requests comes from a bot that identifies itself, though, and Conroy said Cloudflare has enough visibility across its traffic to infer what the rest are doing, with findings to be published on Cloudflare Radar (Cloudflare, 2026).

Soon, Conroy said, agents will vouch for the humans behind them with credentials that range from an anonymous identifier to a verified identity. A business can then let a vouched shopper check out and turn away an agent that vouches for no one. It can also block one person who abuses an agent without blocking everyone else who uses that agent.

Grant Bourzikas, Cloudflare's chief security officer, showed the telemetry base behind that inference. A slide titled "Our telemetry feeds every product" traced what the network sees about active attacks and the actors behind them into each Cloudflare product, and another put attacks at 310 billion a day in 2026, up 63 percent from 190 billion in 2025 (Cloudflare, 2026). Bourzikas also gave analysts at the event an off-the-record talk, and nothing from it appears here.

Those controls depend on the accuracy of Cloudflare's labels for the unnamed majority, since a wrong label turns away a legitimate buyer or admits a scraper.

Open standards give a business some room to move. Cloudflare's own blog describes x402 as a protocol that attaches payment to ordinary web requests, and Shopify, which turns on the Universal Commerce Protocol by default for its merchants, co-developed that standard with Google so any agent can buy under a merchant's own checkout rules. The rule sets built on top of those protocols stay with whichever network enforces them.

An agent 300 milliseconds away makes one-sixth as many calls

Cohen put the infrastructure argument in arithmetic. At 50 milliseconds from the network, an agent makes 30 calls in a second and a half, and an agent 300 milliseconds away makes five (Cloudflare, 2026). Cloudflare says its network sits within 50 milliseconds of 95 percent of the world's population, spans more than 340 cities in over 130 countries, and runs every service on every machine, a design the company calls region Earth.

Raj Subramaniyan, Oracle's senior vice president of networking, said Oracle uses Cloudflare's Magic Transit as an extra layer of protection near its own network edge, and a slide showed more than 225 live and planned Oracle cloud regions (Oracle, 2026). A network contract signed for security therefore also influences how many steps agents complete against your site.

Telekom Deutschland wants choice and control, and Cloudflare's roadmap runs to 2029

Dr. Alexandra Heidel, vice president of internet and content at Telekom Deutschland, said Telekom will extend its enterprise portfolio with Cloudflare security and connectivity offerings. She defined sovereignty as a choice of technologies and partners combined with control over where data and critical services sit, and named sovereign AI as a large opportunity for Telekom.

Cloudflare's answer is a data residency architecture that moves its own control and logging systems onto Workers and Durable Objects, so a customer can choose where each runs.

Wesley Evans of Cloudflare laid out the cryptography schedule. At the keynote, 100 percent of Cloudflare's onramps for its edge network and Cloudflare One supported quantum-secure encryption. Post-quantum authentication with Merkle Tree Certificates arrives in 2027, and all Cloudflare systems reach quantum-secure encryption and authentication in 2029 (Cloudflare, 2026).

A three-year contract signed now runs through the 2027 milestone and reaches 2029, the year Cloudflare expects to finish.

Customers build their internal tools on the same primitives

Steve Tannock, vice president of platform engineering excellence at Telus, described Gizmos, an internal platform where an employee asks in plain language for a tool and an agent publishes it, with each tool running as its own Worker. In the four months since launch, employees have built more than 11,000 of them, and more than one in ten employees has built one (Cloudflare, 2026).

Tecovas built Boot Runner on the Cloudflare developer platform so a store associate can request a boot size from the stockroom without leaving the customer. Kevin Harwood, Tecovas's chief technology officer, and Aparna Subramanian, Shopify's vice president of engineering for infrastructure, presented it together. A slide showed four store surfaces sharing one application programming interface that runs on Durable Objects, D1, Queues, and R2.

Sam Rhea, Cloudflare's chief information officer, showed the internal workspace his team built for Cloudflare employees, Cloudflare OS, and said Cloudflare is packaging it as an open source project that any company can rename and run. A slide laid out four modes: ask questions of your data, make documents, sheets, and decks, build apps backed by live data, and run agents and workflows. Rhea said the chief information officers and chief security officers he talks with want two things: a safe place for non-engineers to build, and a token bill that does not climb with every new use. Telus and Tecovas show the pattern: the people closest to the work found the uses for the platform, and your own developers likely have a similar list.