Deep bot visibility and protection for today’s modern web

Fastly’s bot detection is performed in real time at the edge, where traffic can be evaluated before it reaches origin infrastructure. By analyzing behavioral signals, protocol characteristics, and high-fidelity client data, Fastly identifies automated traffic with greater accuracy than approaches that rely on static rules or IP reputation alone.

Fastly Bot Management blocks bots based on observed behavior and intent rather than intrusive challenges. This allows malicious automation to be mitigated while legitimate users, trusted services, and approved bots continue to access applications without added friction or latency. It also integrates with Apple’s Automatic Verification to determine user traffic versus bot traffic.

Fastly Bot Management is designed to mitigate a broad range of bot attacks, including credential stuffing / account takeover attempts, scraping, inventory abuse, application-layer DDoS, and business logic abuse. These protections operate continuously, even as attackers change infrastructure or evasion techniques.

Unlike a traditional bot manager that relies on static signatures or manual tuning, Fastly Bot Management adapts dynamically to evolving bot behavior. Detection and mitigation decisions are enforced at the edge, reducing operational overhead and improving resilience against sophisticated automation. Additionally, deceptive tactics can be used against attackers putting them in a defensive maze, neutralizing them as a threat.

Yes. Fastly Bot Management supports bot protection for both web applications and APIs. Teams can detect abusive automation targeting API endpoints while allowing legitimate machine-to-machine traffic, partners, and internal services to operate uninterrupted.

Fastly’s bot detection does not depend on easily spoofed attributes such as IP addresses or user-agent strings. Instead, it correlates behavioral and client signals over time, making it effective against bots that rotate IPs, mimic browsers, or attempt to blend in with human traffic.

Fastly Bot Management allows engineering and security teams to tailor bot protection based on application risk profiles. Teams can selectively block bots, rate-limit suspicious traffic, or allow known automation—without requiring application code changes.

By blocking malicious bots at the edge, Fastly prevents bot traffic from consuming origin compute, bandwidth, and database resources. This helps reduce infrastructure costs and protects application performance during large-scale bot attacks.

Fastly Bot Management works alongside WAFs, DDoS protection, API Discovery, identity systems, and SIEM tooling. Bot decisions made at the edge reduce noise downstream, allowing security teams to focus on higher-signal events and incidents.

Yes. Fastly’s globally distributed edge platform enables low-latency bot detection and bot protection at scale, making it well suited for high-traffic applications, global platforms, and performance-critical user experiences.