Fastly offers everything you need from a modern CDN, from effortless scale and built-in security to programmable control and full visibility.
Control bots without breaking your business
Fastly Bot Management
Respond to automated traffic with the nuance your business and security posture requires.
Benefits
Operate with confidence in the era of AI
Addressing bots requires a new level of visibility, context, and capabilities to address their nuanced 'wanted' and 'unwanted' nature
Gain Clear Visibility
Detect even the most sophisticated automation ranging from AI crawlers and fetchers, to headless browsers and malicious bots
Go beyond blocking
Engage bots with future-ready features that put the power back in defender's hands
Shape how bots impact your business
Leave arbitrary scores in favor of transparent insights and straightforward configuration
Features
Unlock your bot strategy
Automation is forcing organizations around the world to reconsider how they treat bot traffic. Unlike traditional threats, bots are a pervasive challenge to not only security when malicious, but business operations as even 'wanted' bots crawl, scrape, and can work at scales beyond what's deemed abusive. Fastly Bot Management is purpose-built to help you see bot traffic, control it, and maintain resiliency despite their evolving nature.
Protection against abuse
Prevent automated abuse by exposing all bot activity. Bots can be an invisible threat, but Fastly Bot Management combines server-side and client-side detection mechanisms to highlight the bots trafficking your apps and APIs. Intuitive dashboards can be customized to focus on specific aspects like AI crawlers and we regularly share actionable insights from across our entire customer-base to guide future strategy.
Resilience despite change
Apply the perfect response to evolving AI, malicious bot, and other automated traffic without relying on blunt actions. Binary block and allow responses aren't enough to mitigate the impacts of a nuanced threat like bots. Fastly Bot Management offers innovative Dynamic Challenges, Deception, and AI monetization capabilities on top of everything you're familiar with to optimize your efficacy against numerous types of bots.
Control without complexity
Set how automation should behave and let those decisions run consistently without constant tuning. Bots constantly evolve, but you shouldn't need to choose between nonstop tuning or policies that expose your organzation to abuse. Fastly Bot Management includes intuitive signals that label bot traffic across your sites. You can easily customize them and leverage our simple rule builder to create policies in seconds.
Key use cases
Perfectly balance security and business needs
Separate bots from legitimate traffic and control their activity at scale
Protect your intellectual property
Control and monetize AI bot traffic attemtping to take your valuable content - down to the specific crawler
Reduce fraud
Prevent bots from gaining unauthorized access to accounts (ATO), spamming endpoints, and using stolen cards
Control operational spend
Block botnets from artificially inflating egress and other operational costs
Prevent competitive intelligence
Stop your competition's bots from gathering strategic insights
Safeguard revenue
Ensure bots aren't exploiting promotions, hoarding or scalping inventory
Enhance customer trust
Deliver secure, seamless experiences that drive confidence in your brand
“Fastly's new Bot Management solution provides granular visibility and rule setting capability to let the good traffic in and keep the bad traffic out, which will help us protect our content and reduce infrastructure costs.”
Paul Laleu
CTO
Recognized Leaders
2025 DEVIES award for Best AppSecOps Innovation
Fastly Bot Management won a 2025 DEVIES Award in the AppSecOps category. The DEVIES Awards are the definitive annual awards for the software-industry recognizing outstanding design, engineering, and innovation in developer technology across 31 categories.
Securing a Modern Online Experience that Demands Performance and Value
Learn how the next generation of application security vendors have adapted to the overcome the shortfalls of legacy WAFs.
Total Economic Impact™ of Fastly Application Security Solutions
Discover how Fastly's web application and API protection (WAAP) solutions delivered a 235% ROI and $4.23M in net benefits over three years.
Want to learn more?
More volume, more security | Bot threat insights report
Explore our latest macro research on bot traffic covering and increase in bot traffic and how organizations are beginning to push back.
Total Economic Impact™ of Fastly Application Security Solutions
Discover how Fastly's web application and API protection (WAAP) solutions delivered a 235% ROI and $4.23M in net benefits over three years.
Fastly bot management datasheet
Dive deeper into the benefits of Fastly Bot Management and how it seanlessly integrates into your stack.
Frequently asked questions
How does Fastly approach bot detection at the edge?
Fastly’s bot detection is performed in real time at the edge, where traffic can be evaluated before it reaches origin infrastructure. By analyzing behavioral signals, protocol characteristics, and high-fidelity client data, Fastly identifies automated traffic with greater accuracy than approaches that rely on static rules or IP reputation alone.
How does Fastly Bot Management block bots without impacting legitimate users?
Fastly Bot Management blocks bots based on observed behavior and intent rather than intrusive challenges. This allows malicious automation to be mitigated while legitimate users, trusted services, and approved bots continue to access applications without added friction or latency. It also integrates with Apple’s Automatic Verification to determine user traffic versus bot traffic.
What types of bot attacks can Fastly Bot Management mitigate?
Fastly Bot Management is designed to mitigate a broad range of bot attacks, including credential stuffing / account takeover attempts, scraping, inventory abuse, application-layer DDoS, and business logic abuse. These protections operate continuously, even as attackers change infrastructure or evasion techniques.
How does Fastly Bot Management differ from a traditional bot manager?
Unlike a traditional bot manager that relies on static signatures or manual tuning, Fastly Bot Management adapts dynamically to evolving bot behavior. Detection and mitigation decisions are enforced at the edge, reducing operational overhead and improving resilience against sophisticated automation. Additionally, deceptive tactics can be used against attackers putting them in a defensive maze, neutralizing them as a threat.
Can Fastly Bot Management protect APIs and machine-to-machine traffic?
Yes. Fastly Bot Management supports bot protection for both web applications and APIs. Teams can detect abusive automation targeting API endpoints while allowing legitimate machine-to-machine traffic, partners, and internal services to operate uninterrupted.
How does Fastly handle sophisticated bots that evade basic bot detection?
Fastly’s bot detection does not depend on easily spoofed attributes such as IP addresses or user-agent strings. Instead, it correlates behavioral and client signals over time, making it effective against bots that rotate IPs, mimic browsers, or attempt to blend in with human traffic.
How customizable is bot management for different applications?
Fastly Bot Management allows engineering and security teams to tailor bot protection based on application risk profiles. Teams can selectively block bots, rate-limit suspicious traffic, or allow known automation—without requiring application code changes.
How does Fastly Bot Management reduce infrastructure and operational costs?
By blocking malicious bots at the edge, Fastly prevents bot traffic from consuming origin compute, bandwidth, and database resources. This helps reduce infrastructure costs and protects application performance during large-scale bot attacks.
How does Fastly Bot Management integrate with other security controls?
Fastly Bot Management works alongside WAFs, DDoS protection, API Discovery, identity systems, and SIEM tooling. Bot decisions made at the edge reduce noise downstream, allowing security teams to focus on higher-signal events and incidents.
Is Fastly Bot Management suitable for high-scale, latency-sensitive environments?
Yes. Fastly’s globally distributed edge platform enables low-latency bot detection and bot protection at scale, making it well suited for high-traffic applications, global platforms, and performance-critical user experiences.