When you open the backend of your website and find that half of the traffic comes from “bots”, what do you think? Is it a malicious attack or a hidden opportunity? In a recent interview, Arcjet CEO David Mytton revealed a disruptive trend: AI bot traffic is sweeping the internet and will only increase in the future! It’s time to rethink how we can gain an advantage in this transformation.
1. AI Bots: Users’ “Avatars”, Not Enemies
You may have heard that 50% of internet traffic is already contributed by bots. But David reminds us that these AI bots are no longer simple web crawlers; they are users’ “digital avatars”. Imagine this: an OpenAI agent helps you search for the opening hours of nearby coffee shops or even directly orders concert tickets. Behind this traffic may lie real monetary transactions!
However, many websites are still using old methods: as soon as they detect a “bot”, they block it directly. Both Joel and David believe this is too blunt! In the future, successful websites will need to learn to distinguish between “good bots” and “bad bots”. For example, e-commerce platforms must not block an order’s revenue simply because they suspect it is from a bot.Insight: AI traffic is not a threat but an extension of user intent; the key is to understand “who is operating and why they are here”.
2. Traditional Defenses Have Failed; Context is the New Solution
In the past, defending against DDoS attacks relied on simple and blunt network interception: IP blacklists, user agent filtering, all blocked. But now, AI bots may come from data centers or disguise themselves as home IPs, and traditional methods are completely outpaced. David points out that the answer lies in the application layer— only by deeply understanding user sessions, behavior patterns, and intents can we accurately control traffic.
For example, if an e-commerce website detects “suspicious” traffic, blocking it directly may result in missing out on genuine user orders. A better approach is to flag the order for manual review to ensure revenue is not lost.Insight: The future of traffic management lies in comprehensive context analysis rather than a one-size-fits-all approach at the network layer.
3. AI Traffic: The Engine of New Revenue
Did you know? AI bots are becoming the “traffic engines” for businesses. Just as Google crawlers bring SEO benefits to websites, AI agents (such as search indexers or trading bots) are also enhancing website exposure and conversion rates. David mentioned that some companies have seen significant increases in registrations and sales by embracing AI traffic.
Conversely, if you blindly block AI, your website may become “invisible” in AI searches, just like those who refused Google indexing back in the day, cutting off their own path.Insight: Embracing AI traffic is not just a technical choice but a business strategy; missing out could marginalize your business.
4. Edge Computing: The Rise of AI “Gatekeepers”
Technology is also accelerating this transformation. Joel and David discussed an exciting trend: edge computing allows AI models to analyze traffic in milliseconds at increasingly lower costs. Imagine your server equipped with an “AI gatekeeper” that assesses the intent of each request in real-time: is it a legitimate user, a malicious attack, or ad click fraud?
This low-latency, cost-effective reasoning capability can not only defend against fraud but also optimize content filtering and even enhance advertising technology. For instance, advertisers can instantly identify invalid clicks, saving huge budgets.Insight: The decreasing cost of reasoning is shifting AI from backend analysis to real-time decision-making, changing the rules of network management.
5. Old Rules Have Failed; A New Order Awaits Construction
However, challenges still exist. David mentioned that standards like robots.txt have long since lost their effectiveness. They rely on bots to “voluntarily” comply, but new AIs may directly ignore them or even exploit them to find sensitive pages. This exposes the old problem of internet governance: a lack of enforcement.
More challenging is the problem of proving “human identity”. The proliferation of AI agents complicates the “human-machine distinction”, and traditional digital signatures are hard to promote due to poor user experience. David believes that new mechanisms are needed in the future, such as request fingerprints or digital signatures, to redefine the order of traffic control.Insight: In the AI era, the internet needs to shift from “voluntary governance” to “enforcement” to ensure the control of website owners.
Conclusion: Turning Threats into Opportunities, Are You Ready?
David emphasized in the conversation that the reduction in reasoning costs has made comprehensive context analysis possible—understanding every detail of users, sessions, and applications is essential to transform AI traffic from a threat into an opportunity. In the face of this AI wave sweeping the internet, we can no longer rely on old methods. Whether you are a website developer, a business owner, or an ordinary user, it is time to rethink how to find your place in this transformation.
What do you think about AI bot traffic? Should we block it or embrace it? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments! We also look forward to more companies, like those discussed by David and Joel, adopting new thinking to welcome the AI-driven future of the internet.
Source Acknowledgment : Thanks to Arcjet CEO David Mytton for the insightful sharing, providing us with forward-looking insights on AI traffic management.
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