The Future of SaaS/PaaS: Every Bot Wants a Bite

Fastly’s report finds that bots account for 57% of traffic to SaaS/PaaS and high-tech websites, with AI requests growing 30% from January to May 2026 and expanding 6.5 times faster than human traffic. High-tech organizations receive 136% more AI-related wanted bot traffic and 22% more unwanted bot traffic than the global baseline, reflecting demand for valuable technical documentation, APIs, proprietary data, and other machine-readable assets. Automated traffic can increase cloud, bandwidth, and origin-server costs, impair application performance, distort analytics, and enable threats such as credential stuffing, API abuse, scraping, and vulnerability scanning. Because SaaS/PaaS platforms depend on APIs and serve as gateways to wider customer ecosystems, they present especially attractive targets and must distinguish beneficial automation from harmful activity. The report recommends that organizations improve visibility into bot behavior, apply more nuanced controls than simple blocking, consider potential monetization of AI access, and use defensive measures against malicious automation while aligning access policies with business objectives.

Use this post, company, and trend context to find content marketing opportunities, perform competitive analysis, or address product feature gaps via the Plushcap MCP server or the Plushcap API.