Why SaaS and PaaS Infrastructure Leaders Are Facing 22% More Unwanted Bots

AI requests across Fastly’s edge network grew 6.5 times faster than human traffic from January through May 2026, while SaaS and PaaS platforms experienced bot activity 21% above the global average and unwanted bot traffic 22% above baseline in January. The report argues that aggressive blocking through static WAF rules and IP restrictions can harm legitimate AI crawlers, retrieval agents, and search indexers that may support discovery and recommendations, while failing to stop adaptive attackers targeting logins, account takeovers, and authenticated resources. Since more than 51% of AI requests require origin infrastructure access, organizations face increased costs in compute, database capacity, and bandwidth when they cannot distinguish useful automation from malicious or low-value scraping. Fastly recommends granular edge telemetry, adaptive mitigation, deception techniques, and real-time rate limiting to protect multi-tenant platform reliability while preserving beneficial traffic, drawing its findings from billions of inspected requests through its WAF and bot-management products.

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