Cloud services giant Fastly has released a report claiming AI crawlers are putting a heavy load on the open web, slurping up sites at a rate that accounts for 80 percent of all AI bot traffic, with the remaining 20 percent used by AI fetchers. Bots and fetchers can hit websites hard, demanding data from a single site in thousands of requests per minute.
According to the report [PDF], Facebook owner Meta's AI division accounts for more than half of those crawlers, while OpenAI accounts for the overwhelming majority of on-demand fetch requests.
"AI bots are reshaping how the internet is accessed and experienced, introducing new complexities for digital platforms," Fastly senior security researcher Arun Kumar opined in a statement on the report's release. "Whether scraping for training data or delivering real-time responses, these bots create new challenges for visibility, control, and cost. You can't secure what you can't see, and without clear verification standards, AI-driven automation risks are becoming a blind spot for digital teams."
The company's report is based on analysis of Fastly's Next-Gen Web Application Firewall (NGWAF) and Bot Management services, which the company says "protect over 130,000 applications and APIs and inspect more than 6.5 trillion requests per month" – giving it plenty of data to play with. The data reveals a growing problem: an increasing website load comes not from human visitors, but from automated crawlers and fetchers working on behalf of chatbot firms.
