The Fastly Edge Cloud Platform

Control bots without breaking your business

Fastly Bot Management

Respond to automated traffic with the nuance your business and security posture requires.

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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 getchers, 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 that Bots are a pervasive challenge to not only security when malicious, but business operations as even 'wanted' bots crawl, scrape, and work at scales beyond 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

Le Monde blocks attacks, improves TTFB with Fastly

Streaming Media

“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

Analyst Reports and Awards

Recognized Leaders

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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.

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