- 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…
