SAN FRANCISCO – August 19, 2025 – Fastly, Inc. (NYSE: FSLY), a leader in global edge cloud platforms, today released its Q2 2025 Threat Insights Report, exposing a striking shift in the nature and scale of automated web traffic. Analysis of traffic from mid-April to mid-July shows that AI crawlers made up almost 80% of all AI bot traffic observed, with Meta generating more than half and eclipsing both Google and OpenAI combined.
They are for anything that’s E2E encrypted such as Messenger and WhatsApp, so that the link isn’t revealed to Meta servers.
As far as I know, for things like posts on Facebook, the server does the scraping. This is especially the case in the web version, since client-side scraping of arbitrary sites would require those sites to have an open CORS policy, which comes with security risks.
There’s a Sharing Debugger tool on the Facebook developer site that lets you force rescrape a site.
Are they sure that the Meta traffic is AI bots? A lot of people share links in posts on Meta products, which scrape the links to generate a preview.
Aren’t those requests made from client devices?
They are for anything that’s E2E encrypted such as Messenger and WhatsApp, so that the link isn’t revealed to Meta servers.
As far as I know, for things like posts on Facebook, the server does the scraping. This is especially the case in the web version, since client-side scraping of arbitrary sites would require those sites to have an open CORS policy, which comes with security risks.
There’s a Sharing Debugger tool on the Facebook developer site that lets you force rescrape a site.
It would not surprise me to see that the traffic traced back to “scrapers”. A user’s perceived relevance often ties to the recency of the dataset.