AI · 6h ago
Akamai’s latest State of the Internet report says verified AI crawlers are moving from page-fetching GET requests to POST requests, with ecommerce accounting for 44.8% of those bot transactions and travel rising to 30% in one 30-day sample. The same report says AI helped drive a 300% increase in bot traffic and a 113% rise in daily API attacks between 2024 and 2025.
A POST request is the kind of request a site uses when a user logs in, adds an item to a cart, or checks out, so the shift blurs indexing traffic into transactional traffic. That makes simple bot filters less useful, because the question is no longer just whether a client looks like a crawler, but whether its behavior matches legitimate automation or abuse.
For ecommerce, travel, and API-heavy platforms, the exposure sits at the action layer: login, cart, checkout, and API endpoints now have to distinguish an AI assistant from a bot posing as one. If your controls were built mainly around page scraping, this trend changes what “normal” traffic looks like without changing the fact that the same requests can still be abused.
2 sources covering this story
Somewhere in your traffic logs, a bot is doing more than looking - Help Net Security
Akamai didn't say which actions they take.
AI Drives Surge in Bot and API Threats
Akamai report warns of increase in bot traffic, API threats, chatbot leaks and other AI-related threats
Part of the PlainSec briefing for 2026-09-22