Techstrong TV — Mon, Jun 1

Half the Web Is Bots — Inside Fastly's Threat Report and the New AI Crawler Problem

Alan Shimel with Marshall Erwin

Marshall Erwin, Chief Information Security Officer at Fastly, joins Alan Shimel on TechStrong TV to dig into Fastly's latest threat report. Roughly 49% of all requests Fastly's customers see are now bot-driven, 99% of that traffic is unwanted, and about 47% of the unwanted traffic is quietly hitting cached content — vacuuming up value without ever touching origin. Marshall walks through how the bot problem has shifted from a narrow security issue (account takeover) into a board-level strategic problem (AI crawlers, AI fetchers and content monetization), and why visibility and intent-aware bot management — not blunt yes/no blocking — is the only way forward. He and Alan also dig into the difference between AI crawlers and AI fetchers, why agentic traffic is actually traffic most sites will want, the role of WAF and bot management in differentiating good vs. bad AI, and how AI itself is becoming a core tool for detecting and responding to AI-driven traffic. Get the report and learn more at https://www.fastly.com.