Gain Visibility into AI Agent Traffic with AWS WAF AI Traffic Analysis

AI agents, bots, and automated systems are rapidly becoming a dominant portion of internet traffic. Many organizations now observe that 30–60% of their web requests come from AI crawlers, research agents, and programmatic tools. This shift introduces new infrastructure costs, security considerations, and business opportunities.

To address this challenge, AWS WAF now includes AI Traffic Analysis dashboards within web access control lists (web ACLs). These dashboards provide detailed visibility into AI bot and agent behavior across your applications.

With Softprom, official AWS Partner, organizations can use this capability not only for security, but also for traffic optimization and AI content monetization strategies.

The challenge: Understanding AI bot traffic

Traditional bot management solutions were not designed to analyze modern AI traffic patterns. Security and operations teams need answers to questions such as:

• Which AI organizations are accessing our content?
• What are they trying to do (crawl, research, collect training data)?
• Which endpoints are most frequently targeted?
• How is this activity changing over time?
• How can we turn this insight into business action?

AI Traffic Analysis dashboard in AWS WAF

The AI Traffic Analysis dashboard is available directly inside your AWS WAF web ACL console and is powered by AWS WAF Bot Control, which now detects more than 650 unique bots and AI agents.

This dashboard provides AI-specific analytics beyond standard security metrics.

Key capabilities

Bot identification and verification

See bot names, owning organizations, and verification status. Distinguish legitimate AI agents from suspicious automation.

Intent classification

Understand whether bots are indexing for search, conducting research, scraping for model training, or performing other actions.

Access pattern analysis

Identify which URLs and endpoints are most targeted by AI agents to understand what content is most valuable.

Temporal and historical trends

Track AI activity by time of day and analyze patterns over the last 14 days to detect anomalies and peak periods.

Organization-level breakdown

See traffic segmented by AI company or bot owner to understand who is consuming your content and at what scale.

How it works

The dashboard integrates with Amazon CloudWatch metrics collected during AWS WAF traffic evaluation. To access:

1. Open your web ACL in the AWS WAF console.
2. Select the AI Traffic Analysis tab.
3. Filter by organization, intent, or verification status.
4. Review visual analytics across bot identity, behavior, and trends.

The dashboard automatically populates as soon as AI bot traffic is detected.

From visibility to action

With detailed AI bot insights, organizations can:

• Make informed allow/block decisions based on intent
• Optimize infrastructure for high-traffic endpoints
• Implement tiered access policies for verified AI agents
• Detect unusual traffic patterns quickly
• Share insights with security, product, and business teams
• Build alerts and automation using CloudWatch metrics

Monetizing AI traffic at the edge

AWS provides a reference architecture combining AWS WAF, Amazon CloudFront, and AWS Lambda@Edge to implement per-path pricing and AI traffic monetization using the x402 payment protocol—without changes to origin systems.

Programmatic access via API

In addition to the dashboard, you can query AI bot traffic programmatically using the AWS WAF API action GetTopPathStatisticsByTraffic via AWS CLI or SDK.

This allows you to:

• Build custom dashboards
• Integrate data into observability platforms
• Trigger alerts on abnormal AI traffic spikes
• Feed insights into BI and monetization workflows
• Investigate traffic anomalies for specific time windows

Availability

• Included for customers on AWS WAF paid plans
• Available at no additional cost for other AWS WAF customers

How Softprom helps

Softprom supports organizations with:

• AWS WAF architecture and bot control configuration
• AI traffic analysis and reporting strategy
• Integration with CloudWatch and observability tools
• Designing monetization and traffic control policies for AI agents

Conclusion

AI-driven traffic is no longer a niche phenomenon—it is a major part of modern web operations. With AI Traffic Analysis in AWS WAF, organizations gain the visibility needed to manage, secure, optimize, and even monetize this new category of traffic. This capability turns AI bot activity from an unknown cost into a measurable, controllable, and strategic asset.