My AI bots account for 80% of the bot traffic, putting a strain on web resources and impacting SEO performance.
Fastly has released its Q2 2025 Threat Insights Report, revealing significant shifts in the sources and impacts of automated web traffic, particularly highlighting the rise of AI crawlers and emerging regional trends. The report, which spans activity from mid-April to mid-July 2025, indicates that AI crawlers now account for nearly 80% of all AI bot traffic. Notably, Meta dominates this space, responsible for over half of the AI crawler interactions, far exceeding Google and OpenAI. Fastly reports that Meta bots generate 52% of observed AI crawler activity, while Google and OpenAI contribute 23% and 20%, respectively. Fetcher bots, which retrieve website content in response to user prompts, including those used by ChatGPT and Perplexity, have resulted in extraordinary real-time request rates, with some instances reaching over 39,000 requests per minute. This surge places significant strain on web infrastructure, increasing bandwidth usage and overwhelming servers, resembling distributed denial-of-service attacks, albeit without malicious intent.
The report also highlights a geographic concentration of AI crawler traffic, with North America receiving almost 90% of interactions, leaving Europe, Asia, and Latin America with a minor share. This disparity raises concerns regarding the geographic bias in datasets used to train large language models, potentially influencing the neutrality and fairness of AI-generated outputs in the future. Fastly’s findings build on its Q1 2025 observations, which noted that automated bot activity constituted 37% of network traffic. While volume was previously the primary concern, the latest data suggests that the challenge now lies in comprehending the evolving complexity of bot-driven activity, particularly in relation to AI-generated content scraping and high-frequency access patterns. Fastly’s research, derived from an analysis of 6.5 trillion monthly requests across its security solutions, provides a comprehensive overview of how AI bots are impacting various industries, including eCommerce, media and entertainment, financial services, and technology. The commerce, media, and high-tech sectors experience the highest rates of content scraping, primarily for training AI models. ChatGPT is specifically noted for driving the most real-time website traffic among fetcher bots, accounting for 98% of related requests. Furthermore, Fastly points out that the ongoing lack of bot verification standards complicates efforts for security teams to differentiate between legitimate automation and impersonation attempts. This gap poses risks to operational resilience and presents challenges in detecting and managing unverified automation traffic.
Categories: AI Crawler Activity, Geographic Distribution, Industry Impact
Tags: AI Crawlers, Automated Web Traffic, Meta, Google, OpenAI, Fetcher Bots, Geographic Bias, Content Scraping, Bot Verification, Operational Resilience