AI bots drive 80% of bot traffic, straining web resources
Fastly has published its Q2 2025 Threat Insights Report, which documents considerable changes in the sources and impact of automated web traffic, highlighting the dominance of AI crawlers and the emergence of notable regional trends.
AI crawler surge
The report, covering activity from mid-April to mid-July 2025, identifies that AI crawlers now constitute almost 80% of all AI bot traffic. Meta is responsible for more than half of this figure, significantly surpassing Google and OpenAI in total AI crawling activity. According to Fastly, Meta bots generate 52% of observed AI crawler interactions, while Google and OpenAI represent 23% and 20% respectively.
Fetcher bots, which access website content in response to user prompts - including those employed by ChatGPT and Perplexity - have led to exceptional real-time request rates. In some instances, fetcher request volumes have reached over 39,000 requests per minute. This phenomenon is noted as placing considerable strain on web infrastructure, increasing bandwidth usage, and overwhelming servers, a scenario that mirrors distributed denial-of-service attacks, though not motivated by malicious intent.
Geographic concentration
North America receives a disproportionate share of AI crawler traffic, accounting for almost 90% of such interactions, leaving a relatively minor portion for Europe, Asia, and Latin America. This imbalance raises concerns over the geographic bias in datasets used to train large language models, and whether this bias could shape the neutrality and fairness of AI-generated outputs in the future.
The findings build on Fastly's Q1 2025 observations, which indicated automated bot activity represented 37% of network traffic. While volume was previously the chief concern, Fastly's latest data suggests that the current challenge lies in understanding the evolving complexity of bot-driven activity, particularly regarding AI-generated content scraping and high-frequency access patterns.
Industry-wide implications
Fastly's research, compiled from an analysis of 6.5 trillion monthly requests across its security solutions, presents a comprehensive overview of how AI bots are affecting a range of industries, including eCommerce, media and entertainment, financial services, and technology. Commerce, media, and high-tech sectors face the highest incidence of content scraping, which is largely undertaken for training AI models.
ChatGPT in particular is cited as driving the most real-time website traffic among fetcher bots, accounting for 98% of related requests. Fastly also notes that a continuing lack of bot verification standards makes it difficult for security teams to distinguish between legitimate automation and attempts at impersonation. According to the report, this gap creates risks for operational resilience and poses challenges for detecting and managing unverified automation traffic.
Verification and visibility
"AI Bots are reshaping how the internet is accessed and experienced, introducing new complexities for digital platforms," said Arun Kumar, Senior Security Researcher at Fastly. "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. Businesses need the tools and insights to manage automated traffic with the same precision and urgency as any other infrastructure or security risk."
The report recommends increased transparency in bot verification, more explicit identification by bot operators, and refined management strategies for handling automated traffic. In the absence of such measures, organisations may encounter rising levels of unaccounted-for automation, difficulties in attributing online activity, and escalating infrastructure expenses.
