Overview

• Cloudflare and Fastly report that AI-related bots now account for nearly 80% of AI bot traffic, and Cloudflare estimates bots comprise about 30% of global web traffic.
• Meta generates roughly 52% of AI crawler traffic, exceeding Google at about 23% and OpenAI near 20%.
• Cloudflare’s crawl-to-refer tracking shows extreme imbalances, with some platforms hitting ratios of 50,000–70,900 crawls for a single referral.
• Fastly warns that fetcher bots drive most AI bot activity in its data and can trigger 10–20x traffic surges within minutes, while other datasets point to training scrapers as the dominant source.
• Website operators are adopting stricter blocks and controls; the Read the Docs project cut bandwidth around 75% and saved about $1,500 per month after stopping AI crawlers.