Adapt, Protect, and Extend: How Partners Can Help Orgs Unlock ROI from AI

• Data doesn't lie. AI bot traffic has surged by 300% in the last half-year, signaling the end of the internet as we’ve known it. 

• We are no longer designing digital experiences solely for human eyes, but for the large language models (LLMs) that now sit between brands and their audiences. 

• This shift to an answer-based economy is putting unprecedented pressure on both marketing return on investment (ROI) and technical performance. 

• As the search-and-click era fades, organizations must master generative engine optimization (GEO) — not just to improve their rank in search engines, but also to remain relevant in a landscape dominated by agentic AI.

This blog post explores the "adapt, protect, and extend" maturity curve that was designed to help partners lead high-value consultative conversations. By understanding the rise of the agentic web and the evolution of user intent, partners can help customers navigate new risks while also capturing significant ROI.

The year 2025 was an impactful period for technology, but 2026 is when the rubber will meet the road. Organizations across every industry are no longer just experimenting with AI; they are actively seeking ways to turn its potential into tangible business results. This transition is creating a new set of challenges and opportunities for partners who manage and secure their customer’s digital experiences.

Understanding this transition is the first step in helping customers elevate their business strategies. As the digital landscape moves from traditional link-based structures to intent-driven interfaces, the role of Akamai partners becomes more critical than ever.

A defining characteristic of this new era is the staggering 300% growth in AI bot traffic observed over the last six months. These bots are perpetually active, crawling the web to feed the LLMs that power tools like ChatGPT and Claude. This increase represents a transition to an agentic web, where automated programs perform tasks and make decisions on behalf of users.

Although these agents offer the promise of improved customer outcomes and streamlined processes, they are not deterministic. Businesses must implement strict guardrails to ensure compliance, privacy, and security in this nonlinear environment.

The traditional link-based economy, in which businesses fought for a spot on "page one," is rapidly being superseded. Users are increasingly using LLMs as their primary interface for intent, expecting direct answers rather than a list of blue links. This has birthed the era of GEO, in which businesses must fight to be the authoritative source that an AI chooses to cite.

For many enterprises, this is a pivot from optimizing for humans to optimizing for the AI that serves humans. Failing to adapt to this zero-click reality can lead to significant erosion in user traffic and engagement.

GEO is becoming a survival strategy for any brand with an inventory of content that needs to be found. LLM searches alone can lessen site traffic by as much as 94% because users often receive their answers immediately. To remain relevant, companies are creating programmatic versions of their websites designed specifically for these new crawlers.

Partners can play a vital role here by helping customers secure these new pathways with Akamai Content Protector, which identifies and blocks malicious scraping attacks while allowing beneficial web traffic to flow, thereby protecting the customers’ intellectual property, revenue, and site performance. 

Ensuring that brand content is not only correctly represented but also easily accessible to scrapers is now a core business priority that can be achieved through a combination of routing solutions (e.g., Akamai EdgeWorkers and Akamai Global Traffic Management), web performance, and an agent-friendly site built through partners like Scrunch.

To help customers navigate this transformation, partners can use a three-stage maturity curve: adapt, protect, and extend. This framework provides a roadmap for moving from initial awareness to sophisticated, AI-driven growth by:

• Adapting to the surge in automated traffic: Focus on understanding who is visiting the site and establishing a baseline for bot vs. human traffic.

• Protecting the new AI attack surface: Implement guardrails for new AI interfaces and secure the expanding attack surface.

• Extending workloads beyond a centralized cloud: Grow the business by deploying AI workloads in a distributed, multicloud environment.

The first step in any AI journey is establishing visibility into the current digital environment. Akamai Bot Manager allows organizations to identify which bots are coming to their site and, more important, what their intent is. This visibility helps marketing teams understand how their traffic is shifting between humans and agents.

By correctly managing these flows, businesses can work with bot operators to monetize their content rather than simply block access. This strategic management preserves brand reputation and revenue in an increasingly automated world.

As enterprises enable chat interfaces, they introduce new risks, such as prompt abuse and unauthorized data access. Akamai Firewall for AI is designed to provide guardrails for these interactions, preventing applications from being manipulated into doing things they shouldn't.

Beyond the interface, protecting the underlying data and workloads is paramount. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation provides the ability to discover and protect workloads across the platform. This helps ensure that as the attack surface grows with new apps and APIs, an organization’s most important assets remain secure.

The final stage involves moving AI workloads away from centralized clouds to improve performance and maintain privacy. By 2027, it is estimated that 50% of enterprise AI workloads will be deployed outside of traditional centralized environments. Akamai's distributed cloud provides the infrastructure needed to run these high-throughput, low-latency applications closer to the user.

This shift allows businesses to scale their agents and data pipelines while maintaining real-time responsiveness. Leveraging GPU-accelerated compute at the edge is becoming a key differentiator for the next generation of AI applications.

Akamai Inference Cloud is a platform built for scaling AI inference applications globally. Through a partnership with NVIDIA, Akamai is deploying the latest Blackwell GPUs across its network. This provides enterprises with access to high-performance compute in areas often underserved by traditional hyperscalers.

By combining this compute power with edge security, businesses can build agentic workflows that are both fast and secure. This architecture is essential for any application that requires real-time processing and massive data throughput.

Publishers are often the first to feel the impact of shifting AI search patterns. Many face challenges with LLM crawlers that bypass traditional "do not crawl" instructions. To address this, Akamai has partnered with specialized providers like TollBit and Skyfire.

These partnerships help publishers programmatically negotiate monetization for access to content. This technical ability to "ask nicely" for payment enables content creators to be fairly compensated as their data feeds the next generation of LLMs.

Ensuring that content shows up correctly in an AI search is a complex task that requires more than traditional search engine optimization (SEO). Akamai's partnership with Scrunch allows businesses to prioritize the information they want to be displayed to LLM scrapers. This helps ensure that the most recent prices, styles, or blog updates are surfaced in zero-click search results.

This service complements existing Akamai CDN and bot management strategies by focusing on the specific needs of AI audiences. It transforms a technical security conversation into a business-centric discussion about revenue preservation.

The rapid pace of AI evolution makes consultative selling more important than ever. Successful partners are those that can provide the context and expertise to help customers make complex architectural decisions. Akamai supports this provision by making products easier to install and configure, allowing partners to focus on value-added services.

Whether it's recommending new security rules or providing attack surface reports, these services build long-term trust. Partners can also guide customers through multicloud strategies where traditional cloud native security tools often fall short.

In a multicloud environment, having a single interface for observability is critical. TrafficPeak allows customers to stream multiple CDN and SIEM logs into a unified interface. Partners can build custom dashboards to help clients visualize traffic spikes, bot events, and monetization trends.

This level of visibility is essential for understanding how AI is impacting the business in real time. It allows for data-driven recommendations that align technical infrastructure with business goals.

As privacy concerns and regional regulations grow, the demand for sovereign and alternative clouds is increasing. Akamai is meeting this demand by expanding its cloud capabilities and developing a strategy for Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. These servers will allow businesses to build secure, agentic use cases directly on Akamai’s distributed platform.

This evolution ensures that as customers move away from centralized hyperscalers, they have a reliable partner for both compute and security. The goal is to provide a consistent management experience across all clouds.

Although AI is the new frontier, traditional security remains the foundation of trust. This includes staying ahead of cryptographic standards and preparing for the era of quantum advantage. Akamai continues to invest in unified, AI-powered platforms that provide recommendations based on global data signals.

By integrating with major identity providers like Okta, Ping Identity, and Microsoft, Akamai helps ensure that access security remains seamless. These table stakes are essential for any business looking to monetize and scale its AI applications.

To help you lead these conversations, Akamai is significantly growing its developer advocacy program. You can expect more hands-on labs, GitHub samples, and explainer videos focused on MCP and cloud development. Additionally, keep an eye out for major announcements at this year's GTC and RSAC conferences.

The Akamai Partner Portal has been revitalized with new content and thought leadership to support your AI journey. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to this changing landscape — but with the right tools, you can help your customers thrive.

Want to dive deeper into the insights shared here? Watch the full episode of the Akamai Partner Champions podcast featuring Ari Weil and host Nick Watkins, to hear their full discussion about agentic AI, GEO, and the future of the distributed cloud.