'AI traffic is fundamentally changing how the Internet works': A new report claims that bot traffic is growing 6.5 times faster than that of human users. Is this the end of the useful Internet as we know it?

Human Traffic Has Increased, But AI Traffic Has Increased 6.5x, Fastly Report Claims
Uncacheable AI requests are overloading hosting infrastructure
Companies must rethink website management and content discoverability

New Fastly analysis of its own global edge network has revealed that AI requests increased by around 30% in the first five months of 2026; While human traffic also increased, AI traffic grew at about 6.5 times the pace of human traffic.

But the company argues that this is much more than a simple increase in bot traffic: it signals the emergence of an entirely new layer of the Internet where artificial intelligence systems increasingly interact directly with websites on behalf of human users.

Chief Technology Officer Artur Bergman noted that “AI traffic is fundamentally changing how the Internet works” and that companies are no longer creating online experiences just for their human visitors.

AI is changing the way we build for the Internet

Fastly’s research highlights that AI trafficking is not just one thing, like human trafficking. Instead, it consists of multiple elements, including AI trackers that most people automatically think of. They crawl websites to create and update LLM training data sets similar to search engine crawlers.

Fastly noted that they account for 85% of AI requests, and because they operate continuously rather than following human navigation patterns, they can put relatively little additional pressure on hosting infrastructure.

You also have AI recoveries, which Fastly believes are increasingly important and relevant. They retrieve live information to answer user questions, compare prices, check availability, and validate data, and are an increasingly crucial part of agent AI.

They are triggered when a user interacts with a tool like ChatGPT or Gemini, but while they only make up around 15% of AI traffic for now, Fastly sees this changing quite dramatically. Between January and May, the company also saw a 555% increase in Claude-related traffic as its agent tools gained traction in the mass market.

AI is impacting online traffic much faster than we thought

But there is more: simply who accesses the information and when. Fastly found that while less than 9% of human requests require content to be fetched from an origin server, more than half (51%) of AI requests do.

This means that AI traffic can be cached much less because it requests more recent information, ultimately resulting in higher infrastructure costs.

The report reveals how preparing a site for these new challenges can impact discoverability, customer acquisition, AI search visibility, and more. “The challenge is no longer simply blocking bots, but understanding which machine-to-machine interactions need to be sped up, managed, challenged, or stopped,” Bergman added.

Cloudflare has also seen an increase in AI-powered traffic. Their live data dashboards reveal how bots now account for more traffic (57%) than humans (43%). And the biggest driver of this is probably the rapid growth of artificial intelligence agents instead of traditional malicious bots.

All of this continues to mark continued growth: earlier this year, Tollbit revealed that there was one new visit from an AI bot for every 31 human visits and that direct human visits were actually declining. Not because we use the Internet less, but because our means of access are changing to AI.

For publishers, it is arguably one of the biggest structural changes since the rise of Google search and social media, where AI now threatens to replace human search traffic. Publishers must now consider how to monetize AI directly and must also reconsider how to reach new audiences beyond conventional SEO.

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