Additional commentary by Emily Lyons

Welcome back to AI Pulse, our blog series where we deep dive into the AI bot traffic insights we’re observing across the Akamai network. If you missed any of the previous blog posts in the AI Pulse series, be sure to check them out:

OpenAI’s Wild Bot Behavior After GPT-5

AI Bot Mitigation Is Increasing Everywhere

What Circadian Rhythms Reveal About AI Bot Behavior

How Big Tech Impacts AI Bot Traffic

AI Bots Are Targeting Commerce, Publishers, and High Tech

The Rise of AI Search Crawlers

How OpenAI Became the Majority Player

You may have noticed that we skipped last week’s post … and for good reason. We’ve been gearing up for something special: the first-ever agentic Cyber Week breakdown .

What is Cyber Week?

Cyber Week is the widely recognized five-day stretch of online shopping that runs from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday in the United States.…