Cloudflare, Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, and Shopify are building PACT, a privacy-first protocol to verify web traffic legitimacy.

Cloudflare has announced a joint initiative with Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Microsoft Edge to develop a new internet protocol that verifies whether web traffic is legitimate without tracking users. The protocol, called Private Access Control Tokens, is designed to replace CAPTCHAs and forced logins with anonymous tokens that prove a visitor is human or an authorised bot. Shopify co-developed the technology and the group plans to submit it for formal standardisation.

The announcement comes as bot traffic has officially overtaken human activity online. Cloudflare Radar data shows automated systems now account for roughly 58 percent of HTTP requests to web content worldwide, against 42 percent from people. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince shared the milestone on June 3, noting that agentic AI programs browsing on behalf of assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini had accelerated the crossover by about 18 months ahead of his earlier predictions.

PACT works by allowing websites with strong knowledge of a visitor’s identity to issue anonymous tokens. A user’s browser stores the token and can present it to other websites as proof that a real person is behind the session, reducing the need for repeated identity checks. The protocol is designed so that the token cannot be used to track users or reconstruct their browsing history.

“The way we interact with the Internet is facing a fundamental shift,” Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht said in the announcement. “As AI-powered traffic becomes widespread, existing tools to support its use are too generic and coarse.” He said the collaboration would eliminate the friction caused by security protocols for every visitor, whether human or agent, without sacrificing privacy.

The initiative does not aim to block all automated traffic. Cloudflare has itself embraced agentic AI, cutting 1,100 jobs earlier this year after declaring that AI agents now perform work previously done by humans. For many AI agents there is still a human somewhere in the loop with a legitimate reason to access a website.

PACT is meant to distinguish those authorised agents from malicious scrapers and abuse bots, not to shut down automation entirely.

The browser makers framed the effort as essential to the open web. Bobby Holley, CTO for Firefox at Mozilla, said an “avalanche of automated traffic” was pushing sites toward blunt defences like paywalls, identity checks, and invasive tracking. Erik Anderson, director of engineering for the web platform at Microsoft Edge, called effective privacy-preserving tools critical to combating abuse without unnecessary user friction.

Shopify’s involvement reflects the commercial stakes. Ilya Grigorik, a distinguished engineer at the company, said every extra challenge or false positive in ecommerce can turn a purchase into an abandoned cart. Covert browser fingerprinting and extension scanning have emerged as the default tools for platforms trying to identify users, a practice that privacy advocates and regulators have pushed back against.

PACT would offer a standardised alternative that does not require harvesting device characteristics or tracking browsing behaviour.

The protocol builds on earlier work in the same space. Apple already uses a related system called Privacy Pass, which works with a device’s secure enclave to attest to a user’s identity, and Cloudflare uses Privacy Pass as a signal in its bot management products. The IETF published the Privacy Pass Architecture as RFC 9576, and PACT extends that foundation with broader browser support and a focus on the agentic AI traffic that has reshaped the composition of the web in the past year.

No deployment timeline has been announced. The partners have committed to developing the protocol and submitting it for standardisation, but turning a specification into something that works across billions of browser sessions will take time. Users are already migrating away from platforms that impose AI features without consent, and the question of how to manage automated traffic without alienating human visitors is becoming more urgent by the quarter.

Whether PACT arrives fast enough to matter depends on how quickly the standards process moves and how willing websites are to adopt a system that, by design, gives them less data about their visitors rather than more.