According to a new analysis from Akamai, verified AI crawlers are no longer just reading web pages. Over a 30-day period, the company observed bots—including those associated with ChatGPT—sending high-frequency POST requests across its global customer base. The shift from GET to POST is notable because POST requests typically submit data, suggesting these bots are interacting with web forms and other endpoints rather than simply indexing content.
The sector breakdown underscores where this activity is concentrated. Ecommerce accounted for 44.8% of all AI bot POST transactions in the study, while travel climbed to 30% of the total. These are the kinds of sites where interactive features like search, booking, and checkout are common, and where bot traffic can have direct business impact.
Akamai's findings point to a growing need for security teams to distinguish between benign scraping and more active bot behavior. As AI crawlers take actions beyond reading, the line between legitimate automation and abuse becomes harder to draw.