Half the Web Is Bots — Inside Fastly's Threat Report and the New AI Crawler Problem
Techstrong TV Interviews
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16m
Marshall Erwin, Chief Information Security Officer at Fastly, joins Alan Shimel on TechStrong TV to dig into Fastly's latest threat report — and the numbers are staggering. Roughly 49% of all requests Fastly's customers see are now bot-driven, and 99% of that traffic is unwanted. Even more eye-opening: about 47% of unwanted bot traffic is hitting cached content, quietly siphoning value off platforms without ever touching origin. Marshall walks through Fastly's view from one of the world's largest CDNs, how the bot problem has shifted from a narrow security issue (account takeover) into a board-level strategic problem (AI crawlers, AI fetchers and content monetization), and why visibility and intent-aware bot management — not blunt yes/no blocking — is the only way forward. He and Alan also dig into the difference between AI crawlers and AI fetchers, why agentic traffic is actually traffic most sites will want, the role of WAF and bot management in differentiating good vs. bad AI, and how AI itself is becoming a core tool for detecting and responding to AI-driven traffic.
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