AI agent monitoring refers to the activities involved in detecting and controlling automated traffic generated by AI agents as it interacts with your business ecosystem. The goal of AI agent monitoring in this context is to control which agents interact with your infrastructure, APIs and applications, and how they do so. By managing bot interactions with all of your business assets, you can prevent unwanted outcomes: security concerns, use of your IP, infrastructure strain, and more.
What is AI traffic?
AI traffic refers to a specific subset of bots (automated programs) that crawl the internet for a number of reasons. These bots are often referred to as AI crawlers and AI fetchers. Each serves a slightly different purpose:
AI Crawlers are AI bots that scrounge the internet for information. Crawlers help search engines, and specifically LLMs, keep up with the constantly changing content on the internet, ensuring you always have access to the latest information.
They are automated software programs that systematically visit websites and online resources to collect data used by artificial intelligence systems. They operate without direct human control, following programmed rules to discover, read, and process content at scale. Unlike manual data collection, AI crawlers can scan millions of pages in nearly no time.
These crawlers can have either presumably ‘good’ intent (they are gathering information to build better, more informed AI responses), or ‘bad intent (they may be scraping your precious IP).
AI Fetchers are automated systems that retrieve specific pieces of content for the use of artificial intelligence applications. Unlike AI crawlers, which systematically scan large portions of the web, AI fetchers typically access individual URLs or small sets of resources in response to a direct request. These fetchers are what gather the data for the AI overviews you see when you perform a Google search.
What are wanted and unwanted bots?
At Fastly, we sort bots into ‘wanted’ and ‘unwanted’ to think about their intended actions and whether they are a bot our customers actually want interacting with their websites.
Unwanted Bots. Unwanted bots account for a significant portion of internet traffic, generated by automation tools that provide no business value to websites. Many of these bots are malicious, posing risks such as fraud, data scraping, account takeovers, and infrastructure strain.
Wanted Bots. Wanted bots are legitimate automation tools that send requests to websites, typically in ways that benefit the site. Fastly maintains a curated list of these bots, organized by their specific purposes. These bots play an essential role in many online functions, including search engine indexing, site performance monitoring, and security.
What are the impacts of AI traffic?
AI, agents, automation (wanted and unwanted) are increasingly disruptive to security, reliability, and entire operating strategies. While traditional AppSec challenges could often be solved by blocking or allowing traffic, bots and agents require an unprecedented level of nuance that forces organizations to develop new strategies tailored to this type of traffic.
Allowing AI to interact, uncontrolled, with your website risks divulging competitive intelligence, data gathering of your most popular content, and even nefarious activities. Deeper visibility into cached content is imperative to operating margins and overall strategy, so your most frequently viewed content and who can leverage it remains within your control.
The sheer volume of bots forces organizations to go beyond simply acknowledging that bots are part of their traffic. You must understand who these bots are, why they’re accessing their content, their intent, and whether each is permissible.
Who should be concerned about AI traffic?
Everyone.
We are witnessing AI actively reshape entire industries, with digital publishing serving as a prime example. One crawl of a publisher’s site means the valuable content can now be served directly from an LLM, and users might never access the source website to gather information. This results in a punishing reality where publishers’ very way of doing business could be greatly impacted by AI.
All industries must factor AI into their strategy or risk long-term impact; allowing scraping of inaccurate or outdated content can dilute the value of intellectual property, surface compliance risks, and present a misleading or weakened brand image and reputation. Managing how bots interact with content isn’t just a technical concern; it's a governance, security, and brand imperative.
In simplest terms, allowing AI to interact with your business, without appropriate AI agent monitoring activities in place, poses enormous business risk.
How can a CDN help with AI traffic?
A content delivery network (CDN) can be a great part of your AI agent monitoring strategy. CDNs sit in front of your entire website (and applications), serving as an effective layer of defense against all incoming traffic. CDNs evaluate requests as they come in, flagging and blocking anomalies.
These capabilities are very important in the context of AI bots. These bots are increasingly sophisticated and are often capable of imitating human behavior to avoid detection.
By operating at the edge, CDNs can make instant decisions (based on your rules) about how to handle incoming traffic requests. Anything that looks suspicious can be blocked outright, or slowed down with rate limiting. You can also implement verification mechanisms to ensure traffic is screened.
Given these capabilities, CDNs not only help prevent your infrastructure from being overloaded by malicious or unwanted traffic, but they also block any bad bot from accessing your site.
How can a bot management solution help with AI traffic?
Bot management solutions help provide visibility and control over automated traffic, including AI bots. Unlike traditional bots, AI agents can often interact with your site and applications in a way that appears legitimate, but is in fact being done for nefarious purposes. They are increasingly sophisticated and require a sophisticated solution.
Bot management tools continuously monitor incoming traffic to detect anything suspicious and to classify the traffic: is it human, automated, and is it good or bad? It accomplishes this by analyzing patterns and behavior to flag anything that goes against your particular blocking and allowance policies.
Once the traffic has been classified, it either blocks or allows the traffic, based upon the policies your organization has defined. Some AI agents are beneficial (think assistants) while others may be essentially scraping or stealing content from your site. By defining which traffic you want, and don’t want, a bot solution can take appropriate measures in line with your bot policies.
Bot solutions offer real-time enforcement of these policies, allowing you to apply controls: you can rate limit, restrict access, or even challenge traffic (to test whether it’s legit) before allowing it into your systems.
How Fastly can help
Bot traffic isn’t going anywhere. This means establishing a plan to strategically monitor and manage it is no longer optional. When bots account for even small portions of overall traffic, they can still put undue strain on infrastructure, demanding a modern bot management solution.
Organizations must gather powerful insights into their bot traffic to inform future strategic decisions. It is no longer enough to simply accept that bots are on your services without seeking additional granularity. Businesses must strive to gather granular insights to the level of individual bots on their services - only with this depth of visibility can policies be created around which receive unique treatment.
Fastly AI Bot Management is trusted by customers across industries to provide the visibility and control needed to distinguish between helpful and harmful bot activity in real time. When it comes to bot operators, transparent intent, verifiable identification, adherence to standards, and responsible crawling can help strike a balance between innovation, fair content use, and preserving control for website owners. Ultimately, adapting to this evolving landscape will be key to safeguarding digital assets and unlocking new opportunities.