Why Legitimate AI and Human Users are Getting Elbowed Out of Your Infrastructure
The internet has always been a bit of a noisy, crowded place, but lately it feels like a never-ending brawl in the aisles of some superstore that sells everything from penny candy to luxury jets.
That is essentially what running an enterprise website or API endpoint feels like in 2026: brawl management.
Automated scripts are now advanced, highly coordinated AI agents acting on behalf of competitors, scrapers, search engines, and sometimes actual buyers. They make eCommerce chaotic and urgent. It makes customers frustrated and fickle.
According to recent industry research, these AI-fueled attacks have spiked by over twelve times compared to previous years, turning what used to be a manageable background nuisance into a crisis that can hit (and hit and hit) at any moment.
The Blurring of the "Good vs. Bad" Bot Binary
We used to have a relatively simple way of sorting internet traffic – you had your human visitors, your helpful search engine crawlers, and the occasional malicious scraper that you could block with a rudimentary IP rule. Now, those neat little boxes have completely fallen apart. AI agents are navigating websites exactly like real humans to the point where they outnumber human users, performing complex searches, adding items to carts, comparing prices across twelve different tabs, and hitting checkout APIs. And they’re doing it a lot faster than humans.
What does this mean for you? Primarily, an influx of automated traffic that bypasses your front-end user interface and goes straight for the high-value APIs: authentication endpoints, search databases, inventory reservation systems, your payment gateways. The sheer volume of these requests eats up server resources, which leaves your actual, human customers waiting forever for a page to load or (even worse) seeing an error message right when they are trying to pay.
Why Your Legacy Security Stack is Whistling in the Dark
A lot of engineering teams assume their existing firewall or CDN-level bot blocking tools are enough, but relying on static IP rules or basic user-agent checks nowadays is like trying to keep a swarm of bees behind a chain-link fence. These new automated threats can mimic human browser behavior, solve legacy CAPTCHAs effortlessly, rotate their IP addresses across thousands of residential proxies, and change their behavioral patterns mid-session the moment they detect any resistance.
If we think back to how older bot mitigation worked, it was mostly reactive. Try that same approach today, and you will end up accidentally blocking legitimate corporate users or legitimate AI agents. AKA, your actual customers.
The challenge is trying to parse the actual intent of every single request in real time without adding a single millisecond of latency to the checkout flow. That is where Datadome bot protection and mitigation comes in.
Deciding Intent
DataDome processes over five trillion signals every single day across more than thirty global points of presence. It makes the decision to allow, throttle, challenge, or block a request in less than two milliseconds by looking at hundreds of silent client-side and server-side signals rather than popping up a frustrating puzzle for your users to solve.
Then again,we also have to deal with agentic commerce, where customers use their own trusted AI assistants to find deals and complete transactions on their behalf. DataDome handles this with its Agent Trust feature, which verifies the identity of good AI agents and lets them interact with your catalog, all while blocking the scrapers trying to steal your pricing and the credential stuffers attempting to break into user accounts. No more reactive scrambles for your security team.
If we look at the latest industry shifts, even the formal analyst reports are ditching the old, rigid security playbooks. In their research paper Secure The Future Of Internet Traffic As Agents Take Over, Forrester point out that we have entered an era where simply trying to shut out every automated connection is a recipe for broken checkout pages. This has evolved into a massive business coordination headache where e-commerce, fraud, marketing, and infrastructure teams have to sit in a room and agree on which AI crawlers to trust, how to monetize specific LLM traffic, when to restrict aggressive scrapers, and where to route legitimate shopping agents.
In Forrester’s Bot And Agent Trust Management category in 2026, DataDome took a leading position – securing the highest score possible across 12 distinct criteria for its heavy focus on practical, real-time telemetry and flexible policy controls.
The Shift from Blocking to Governing
Managing modern internet traffic means verifying identity in real time, allowing helpful automation to pass through while quietly neutralizing the scrapers that are just trying to harvest your intellectual property.
Forrester have highlighted several key areas that will prove pivotal for anyone trying to maintain or scale operations online, including AI Agent Trust Management, No-Sample Intent Visibility, Scraping and Monetization Controls (specific policies by crawler type) and User-Led Innovation: A structured Exploration program that builds new features based directly on thousands of real-world user interviews and over 25,000 daily product interactions.