- Human traffic is up, but AI traffic is up 6.5x more, Fastly report claims
- Uncacheable AI requests are straining hosting infrastructure
- Businesses must rethink website management and content discoverability
New Fastly analysis of its own global edge network has revealed that AI requests increased around 30% in the first five months of 2026 – while human traffic also rose, AI traffic grew at around 6.5x the pace of human traffic.
But the company is arguing that this is much more than just an increase in bot traffic – it signals ,]the emergence of an entirely new layer of the Internet where AI systems increasingly interact directly with websites on behalf of human users.
CTO Artur Bergman noted that “AI traffic is fundamentally changing how the Internet operates,” and that businesses are no longer building online experiences just for their human visitors.
AI is changing how we build for the Internet
Fastly’s research stresses that AI traffic isn’t just one thing, like human traffic. Instead, it consists of multiple elements, including the AI crawlers that most people automatically think of. They crawl websites to build and refresh LLM training datasets in a similar way to search engine crawlers.
Fastly noted they account for 85% of AI requests, and because they operate continuously rather than following human browsing patterns, they can put a relatively small amount of additional strain on hosting infrastructure.
You’ve also got AI fetches, which Fastly believes are becoming more important and relevant. They retrieve live information to answer user questions, compare prices, check availability and validate facts, and are an increasingly crucial part of agentic AI.
They’re prompted into action when a user interacts with a tool like ChatGPT or Gemini, but while they only account for around 15% of AI traffic for now, Fastly sees this changing pretty sharply. Between January and May, the company also observed a 555% increase in Claude-related traffic as its agentic tools gain traction in the mass market.
AI is impacting online traffic much more quickly than we thought
But there’s more to it and simply who is accessing information and when. Fastly found that while fewer than 9% of human requests require content to be fetched from an origin server, more than half (51%) of AI requests do so.
This means that AI traffic is much less cacheable because they request fresher information, ultimately leading to higher infrastructure costs.
The report reveals how preparing a site for these new challenges can affect discoverability, customer acquisition, AI search visibility and more. “The challenge is no longer simply blocking bots, it’s understanding which machine interactions should be accelerated, managed, challenged, or stopped,” Bergman added.
Cloudflare has also been observing a rise in AI-driven traffic. Its live data dashboards reveal how bots now account for more (57%) traffic than humans (43%). And the biggest driver of this is mostly likely the rapid growth of AI agents rather than traditional malicious bots.
All of this continues to mark ongoing growth – at the start of this year, Tollbit revealed that there was a new AI bot visit for every 31 human visits and that direct human visits were actually falling. Not because we’re using the Internet less, but because our means of access is shifting to AI.
For publishers, it’s arguably one of the biggest structural shifts since the rise of Google search and social media, with AI now threatening to replace human search traffic. Publishers now need to consider how to monetize AI directly, and they also need to reconsider how they reach new audiences beyond conventional SEO.
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.
