Report by Fastly
Fastly Threat Insights Report
Key Findings
99% of bot traffic is unwanted or unverifiable.
47% of requests to cached content come from bots.
60% of all origin traffic is from bots.
In January 2026, bots accounted for 49% of all requests, nearly matching human traffic at 51%.
57% of AI fetcher requests target non-cached content.
Bot requests increased by 2% in Q3 2025 compared to the prior quarter, representing billions of requests.
Bots account for 29% of all web traffic, with approximately 25% of this traffic classified as unwanted.
4% of wanted bot requests were blocked, reflecting concerns about data usage and revenue impact.
Only 1% of users click through to source websites that have an AI summary, indicating diminished referral traffic for Media and Entertainment publishers.
Meta’s AI crawler and OpenAI’s ChatGPT fetcher accounted for 60% and 68% of their respective traffic categories in Q3 2025.
In Q3 2025, commerce received 88% of crawler traffic, while the Public Sector received 96%, and Education had the highest fetcher volume at 77%
89% of headless bot traffic (which mimic human behavior at machine speed) in Q3 targeted transaction-heavy industries like Financial Services and Commerce.