AI traffic grows 6.5 times faster than human traffic

Edge cloud platform Fastly has published new research showing just how much AI-generated traffic is changing the internet. Between January and May 2026, AI requests over Fastly's global network increased by around 30 percent - a growth that is about 6.5 times faster than human traffic over the same period. The results make it clear that companies need to rethink how they manage automated requests, protect their infrastructure and derive value from machine interactions.

Four trends that are changing the Internet

Fastly's study identifies several emerging trends: organizations are increasingly making strategic decisions when managing AI traffic, balancing content protection, transparency, customer acquisition and digital distribution. Machine traffic - including AI crawlers, AI fetchers, bots, agents and API-driven systems - now accounts for a significant proportion of all internet activity. AI fetchers and agents are becoming increasingly important as AI assistants retrieve real-time information to answer questions, compare options, check facts and complete tasks on behalf of users.

Artur Bergman, founder and Chief Technology Officer at Fastly, summarizes the development as follows: «AI traffic is fundamentally changing how the internet works. Companies are moving away from a world where humans are the primary users of digital experiences. The challenge is no longer just about blocking bots. It's about understanding which machine interactions should be accelerated, managed, scrutinized or stopped.»

Crawler and fetcher: two different types of AI traffic

The study distinguishes between two categories of AI traffic: AI crawlers systematically collect information from the web to build and update AI models. AI fetchers, on the other hand, retrieve information in response to specific user requests via AI assistants and agent-based applications. Both workloads use infrastructure differently: more than half of AI requests - 51 percent - require origin access, compared to less than 9 percent for human requests. Individual AI services saw particularly strong growth: traffic associated with Claude increased by more than 555 percent compared to January 2026.

From security issue to business strategy

Fastly's analysis shows that companies are reacting differently to the growing AI traffic. In one case, a large company imposed a complete block on a sudden increase in AI fetcher traffic to maintain content authority. Another large company chose not to block AI agents - leading to an increase in fetcher volume over several months and potentially contributing to more visibility on AI-powered services.

The findings suggest that managing AI traffic is evolving from a security and infrastructure issue to a broader business strategy. Fastly identifies three fundamental elements of an effective strategy: visibility into which AI systems are interacting with digital offerings; context into how those systems are behaving and whether they are adding business value; and the precision to respond differently depending on intent and impact. Fastly helps its customers implement such a strategy directly at the edge, using real-time data to balance performance, security, bot management and origin access.

Source: https://www.fastly.com/de.