Knowledge Is Power: Control AI Bot Scraping with Fastly Bot Management

Key Takeaways:

• Scraping isn’t limited to your origin server anymore. A lot of it hits your CDN cache. Fastly Bot Management and ContentGuard cover both.

• A smart bot policy treats various bots differently. It lets search engines and LLM crawlers through, shuts out known bad actors, and slows down anyone scraping too aggressively – based on who they are and how they behave.

• Fastly’s Bot Management dashboard shows you what’s hitting your site and how it’s behaving. In just a few clicks you can block, allow, or challenge them. 

Bot traffic on the internet is increasing faster than ever before, leading to unwanted security challenges and performance degradation for websites and applications. AI requests on Fastly's platform have grown roughly 6.5x faster than human traffic over a single time period.

But we already know that blocking all automated traffic isn't a viable technical or business strategy. This is particularly true if you want your content to be indexed and surfaced in AI-powered search results, or if you want to enforce monetization policies on your content every time an AI fetcher bot accesses it. The best strategy for managing automated agentic traffic isn't to block everything. Instead, it's to block, allow, and control traffic intentionally and strategically based on the intentions and behaviors of the individual bot operator and your desired business outcomes.

AI Crawlers Are Everywhere and Your Cache Isn’t Immune

Coping with automated bot traffic is not a new problem, and solutions have evolved over time as technology has changed. In the earlier days of the internet, serving content to website visitors was much simpler. A piece of content was hosted on a server. An end user requested the content, and the server delivered it – and that was the end of the story. If a bot made the same request, it would be processed in largely the same way as a normal user would. So managing bot traffic came down largely to identifying traffic as coming from an automated source, and taking action to block, allow, or rate-limit it. 

Over time, as websites and applications grew more complex and traffic volumes increased exponentially, content delivery network (CDN) technology emerged to help deal with the challenges of serving massive volumes of content to millions of users quickly and reliably. How does Fastly solve this problem? By storing cached customer content in our network, Fastly can deliver it reliably within milliseconds to countless users around the globe, using the speed and power of our global network of POPs to power instant digital experiences with less strain on customer infrastructure.

With so many applications and websites leveraging CDN technology, it's critical to have a bot management solution that can address and mitigate automated bot traffic anywhere, whether that bot is attempting to scrape content directly from your servers or from within the cache of your CDN. Depending on how your application is structured or how your business model operates, you may serve a piece of content from cache, from your origin servers, or a combination of the two, based on content type or category. 

This complexity can present unique challenges for managing bots, since different strategies for mitigation may be required for cached or non-cached content. That challenge is only growing: AI crawlers are targeting SaaS technology websites at more than double the global average, partially driven by the demands for technical content to help LLMs answer user questions.

How Fastly Bot Management Puts You in Control

You can develop and enforce a consent-based approach in which you retain the power to grant or deny access to your content for specific bots or scraping activities, as determined by your unique business model and individual decision-making framework.

With Fastly Bot Management, you can gain a rapid understanding of what types of bots are accessing your content and the flexibility to control their access, based on their identity, source, or exhibited behaviors, directly at the Fastly edge. With the addition of ContentGuard for Fastly Bot Management, it's easy and straightforward to protect your cached content from unwanted bot scraping, too. Depending on your needs, you can use Fastly Bot Management with or without ContentGuard – the choice is yours.

Bot management is a major headache, but it can be made easier with clear information for rapid decision-making. That's why we built Fastly Bot Management and ContentGuard to make surfacing that information quick and easy. Let's take a look at how that might work in practice. Once you've defined a strategic approach for a particular bot management issue, you can use that strategy in combination with the data from Fastly Bot Management to create rules and apply decision-making logic for traffic that meets those profiles.

For example:

• You want to allow search engines and LLM crawlers to index and scrape your content.

• You want to block any automated scraping from known or suspected malicious scrapers.

• You want to issue dynamic challenges to any unusually high-volume scraping that puts unwanted strain on your systems.

Real-Time Visibility Into Bot Traffic

From the Fastly Bot Management dashboard, you'll have the information at your fingertips to identify these categories of bots and understand their relative impacts. You get the most critical metrics about automated bot traffic and its behaviors right in your dashboard. Simple, straightforward visualizations make it painless to identify types of bots, spot anomalous behaviors and trends, or drill down deeper into individual agent behaviors and traffic patterns for further review and decision-making.

Figure 1: View bot traffic by category, or see most active bots

Once you've identified a category or individual bot of interest, it only takes a few clicks to take your desired action on that bot, based on the strategy you set. This gives you the controls you need to apply your strategy in practice, and can be easily adjusted over time as your needs change.

Figure 2: Take decisive action on bot categories in the Fastly Bot Management dashboard

Bringing It Together: Visibility Plus Control

To build a successful bot management strategy, you need a clear understanding of what bots exist and what they are doing. From there, you can determine which bots are truly "wanted" and welcome in your systems because of the benefits they provide to your business, and block any that don't meet that criterion. You can determine at a fine level of granularity when to allow full access, when and how to surface or limit content, or outright block verified or suspected bots at the category or individual level.

Ultimately, bot management isn't just about blocking – it's about having the control to allow only those agents you choose, with your consent, and in the ways in which your business can continue to achieve its goals. Fastly Bot Management makes it easy to identify which bots are accessing your most valuable content and how they interact with it, and to take action quickly and easily with just a few clicks. ContentGuard adds extra protection for cached content against unwanted bot scraping, so you have the flexibility to protect whatever content you need, wherever it resides. With clear visibility and control, you can embrace the business upsides of AI content scraping and evolve your business in the AI era.

Ready to get started? Contact us to learn more about Bot Management and ContentGuard.