Insider Spotlight
Fastly Inc., a global edge cloud platform provider, said traffic from AI systems across its network increased by approximately 30 percent between January and May 2026, growing about 6.5 times faster than human-generated traffic over the same period.
The company said the trend signals a broader shift in how organizations should approach machine traffic beyond traditional bot management.
The big picture
Machine traffic now accounts for a significant share of internet activity, spanning AI crawlers, fetchers, bots, agents, and API-driven systems.
Fastly said companies are increasingly making strategic decisions about whether AI systems should access their content, as those choices could affect how AI platforms discover, reference, and surface information to users.
"AI traffic is fundamentally changing how the internet operates," Fastly founder and CTO Artur Bergman said in a press statement.
"Businesses are moving beyond a world where humans are the primary users of digital experiences. The challenge is no longer simply blocking bots, it's understanding which machine interactions should be accelerated, managed, challenged, or stopped."
Why it matters
Fastly's research distinguishes AI crawlers, which systematically collect data to train and update AI models, from AI fetchers, which retrieve information in response to user queries through AI assistants and emerging agentic applications.
Based on May 2026 data, more than half, or 51 percent, of AI requests required origin server access, compared with fewer than 9 percent of human requests.
The company also observed Claude-related traffic rising by more than 555 percent from its January 2026 baseline.
The company said customer responses to AI traffic increasingly reflect business priorities. One large organization blocked a surge in AI fetcher traffic to maintain content authority, while another allowed AI agents to continue accessing its platforms, resulting in sustained growth in AI fetcher activity and potentially broader visibility across AI-powered services.
What’s next
Fastly said an effective machine traffic strategy should combine visibility into AI interactions, context on whether those interactions create business value, and precise controls that distinguish between beneficial and harmful machine activity.
The company said these capabilities will become increasingly important as AI systems play a larger role in how consumers discover content, compare products, and complete digital tasks. —Vanessa Hidalgo | Ed: Corrie S. Narisma
