‘AI traffic is fundamentally changing how the internet works’: New report claims bot traffic is growing 6.5 times faster than human users – is this the end of the useful internet as we know it?

Human traffic is increasing, but AI traffic has increased 6.5 times more, the Fastly report claims
AI requests that cannot be saved burden the hosting infrastructure
Companies need to rethink website management and content discoverability

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

But the company claims this is much more than just an increase in bot traffic — it signals the emergence of a whole 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 works,” and that companies are no longer building online experiences just for their human visitors.

AI is changing how we build for the Internet

Fastly’s research emphasizes that AI traffic is not just one thing, just like human traffic. Instead, it consists of several elements, including AI crawlers, which most people automatically think of. They crawl websites to build and update LLM training datasets, similar to search engine crawlers.

It was quickly noted that 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 extra pressure on the hosting infrastructure.

You also have AI fetches, which Fastly believes are becoming more important and relevant. They pull in live information to answer user questions, compare prices, check availability and validate facts and are an increasingly crucial part of agent AI.

They are prompted to action when a user interacts with a tool like ChatGPT or Gemini, but while they only account for around 15% of AI traffic at the moment, Fastly sees this changing quite strongly. Between January and May, the company also observed a 555% increase in Claude-related traffic as its agent tools gain traction in the mass market.

AI is impacting online traffic much faster than we thought

But there is more to it than just who gets access to information and when. quickly 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.

This means that AI traffic is much less cacheable because they request more recent information, ultimately leading to higher infrastructure costs.

The report reveals how preparing a website for these new challenges can impact visibility, customer acquisition, AI search visibility and more. “The challenge is no longer simply blocking bots, it’s understanding which machine interactions need to be accelerated, controlled, challenged or stopped,” Bergman added.

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

All of this continues to mark ongoing growth – earlier this year, Tollbit revealed that there was one new AI bot visit for every 31 human visits, and that direct human visits were actually falling. Not because we use the internet less, but because our access options are changing to artificial intelligence.

For publishers, it is 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 must now consider how to monetize AI directly, and they must also rethink how to reach new audiences beyond conventional SEO.

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