Experian said on July 24, 2026 that Fastly has joined its Agent Trust ecosystem, pushing identity and authorization decisions for AI agents onto the network edge. The pairing arrives as automated systems account for a majority of web traffic and as merchants remain split between blocking that traffic and billing it.

Experian announced the collaboration from its Costa Mesa headquarters at 9:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time on Friday, July 24, 2026. Fastly, the edge cloud platform listed on Nasdaq under the ticker FSLY, becomes the newest named participant in a partner programme Experian first put into the market three months ago. According to Experian, the two companies will help enterprises verify AI agents, authorize transactions, and make trust decisions in real time.

The announcement contains no pricing, no general availability date, no named launch customers, and no published technical specification. What it does contain is a description of where the checks happen, and that placement is the substance of the news.

Moving the decision upstream of the origin server

Fastly's programmable edge platform, according to the announcement, allows organizations to verify AI agent identity, evaluate trust signals, and authorize transactions before requests reach their origin infrastructure. The phrasing matters. A request that is resolved at the edge never consumes origin compute, never touches a checkout service, and never enters an analytics pipeline as a session.

Within the Experian Agent Trust ecosystem, Fastly extends the framework to the network edge so that organizations can evaluate four things about an inbound request: agent identity, delegated authority, intent, and payment credentials. All four are assessed before the request reaches backend systems.

Fastly also supports integrations with emerging Know Your Agent technologies, including Skyfire, which validates identity and payment credentials in milliseconds. Once an agent is identified, organizations can apply identity-based access policies, pricing, rate limiting, and transaction approval while preserving existing business logic. Differential pricing by agent identity is listed there as a supported control, not as an aspiration.

Because the platform integrates with existing APIs, authentication systems, payment workflows, and security controls, businesses can support trusted AI commerce without redesigning their applications, according to Experian.

"As AI agents become an increasingly important channel for digital commerce, businesses need a way to distinguish trusted, authorized agents from everything else," said Jeff Alpen, Vice President of Fastly's Partner Ecosystem, in the announcement. "Instead of treating every autonomous agent as something to block, Fastly enables businesses to verify who is behind the request, attach commercial value, and authorize transactions in real time. We help organizations turn trusted AI agents into a competitive advantage without requiring them to rearchitect their existing infrastructure."

What Agent Trust actually binds

The Experian side of the arrangement rests on a mechanism the company calls Human to Agent Binding, which securely connects verified individuals, their devices, and the AI agents acting on their behalf. The framework is designed to establish trusted identity, delegated authority, and transaction confidence for agents.

Supporting that is the Experian Agent Registry, which maintains dynamic trust scores for Human to Agent Bound agents. Experian launched Agent Trust on April 30, 2026 with Visa, Cloudflare, and Skyfire as its initial ecosystem partners, and the architecture described at that point produced an Agent Trust Token validating both identity and transaction fraud risk at the moment of a transaction, with registry scores updated continuously on behavioural signals. An agent drifting from the patterns associated with its registered human could see its score fall before a transaction completed.

Two weeks after that launch, Experian connected its Ascend Platform natively to the ServiceNow AI Platform on May 15, 2026, embedding identity verification and fraud checks inside enterprise workflow automation. The Fastly collaboration extends the same decisioning layer outward, to the point where traffic first arrives.

"Agentic commerce represents one of the most significant shifts in digital commerce since the rise of mobile," said Kathleen Peters, Chief Innovation Officer at Experian, in the announcement. "As AI agents become active participants in online transactions, businesses need infrastructure that establishes trust without slowing down the customer experience. Experian's Human to Agent Binding is foundational to that trust, creating a persistent connection between verified people and the AI agents acting on their behalf. Fastly extends those trust decisions to the edge, helping organizations authorize transactions in milliseconds while creating secure, seamless experiences for consumers and businesses alike."

Experian frames the work as an extension of its existing fraud business, which the company says helps clients prevent an estimated $15 billion to $19 billion in fraud losses each year. That figure is Experian's own estimate and is not independently audited in the announcement.

The numbers cited, and their provenance

Three market figures appear in the release, each sourced from a third party rather than from Experian or Fastly.

Salesforce reported that AI agents influenced $262 billion in holiday sales during 2025. Imperva reports that 53 percent of all web traffic is automated. McKinsey projects that AI agents could drive up to $1 trillion in United States commerce by 2030.

The first is an influence metric rather than a transaction metric, and influence is a considerably looser standard than completed autonomous purchase. The second sits inside a range that varies by measurement source. Imperva's figure was cited at 51 percent in coverage of Chrome's WebMCP proposal in February 2026, while Cloudflare Radar data covering the seven-day window ending June 5, 2026 put bots at 57.4 percent of all traffic to HTML content, with training-related crawlers alone accounting for 50.6 percent of the total. The gap between 53 and 57.4 reflects different networks, different measurement windows, and different definitions of what counts as HTML traffic. None of the three figures in the release is broken out to isolate transacting agents from crawlers.

The McKinsey projection also carries a wider band elsewhere. The consultancy's November 2025 work put global agentic commerce projections as high as $3 trillion to $5 trillion, against the $1 trillion United States figure quoted here.

Two opposite answers to the same traffic

The framing Experian and Fastly adopt is explicit: rather than viewing AI generated traffic solely as a cybersecurity concern, organizations can recognize trusted AI agents as a new channel for digital commerce that is authenticated, accountable, and ready to transact.

That position sits against a visible counter-current. From September 15, 2026, Cloudflare will block crawlers it classifies as Training and Agent by default on ad-bearing pages for new domains, and five of the largest names in American digital publishing were reported on July 21, 2026 to be evaluating whether to cut Google off from their content entirely. Kinsta's analysis of managed WordPress infrastructure found a single crawler hitting add-to-cart URLs 3.75 million times in one 24-hour period, roughly one request every 23 milliseconds. Cloudflare data published on July 1, 2026 showed crawl-to-referral ratios ranging from 118 to nearly 50,000.

Publishers looking at those ratios reach for the block. Merchants looking at $262 billion of influenced sales reach for the gate. Fastly is now selling to both sides of that split from the same infrastructure position: the company already sits on the buy-side measurement stack too, having brought Google tag gateway to its content delivery network on April 8, 2026 with a cited 14 percent signal uplift.

A crowded identity layer

Agent identity has become one of the most contested infrastructure categories in agentic commerce, and Experian is not alone in claiming it.

Cloudflare partnered with Visa and Mastercard on October 24, 2025 to build cryptographic authentication for shopping agents, producing Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol and Mastercard's Agent Pay, both built on Web Bot Auth. Cloudflare followed with a registry format for discovering and validating agent identities at scale at the end of October 2025. Googlelaunched the Universal Commerce Protocol on January 11, 2026, and Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce and Stripe joined its technical council on April 24, 2026. Skyfire, which appears in both the April Experian launch and this one, runs its own Know Your Agent protocol.

The overlap is not accidental. Each layer solves a different fragment of the same problem, and none of them yet resolves whose registry a merchant should trust when two agents present competing credentials.

Why the plumbing matters for measurement

For advertising and measurement teams the practical stake is contamination. When more than half of inbound traffic is automated and a growing share of it is transacting rather than crawling, the categories that underpin attribution start to blur. An agent that adds to cart on behalf of a verified human is a conversion path. An unsigned agent doing the same thing is either fraud or noise, and analytics systems built for browser sessions cannot reliably tell them apart.

Verification at the edge changes what arrives in the log file. If agent identity, delegated authority, and payment credentials are resolved before the request reaches origin, the traffic that lands in an analytics or retail media system is already sorted. That is a measurement change dressed as a security change.

Adoption remains the open question. An Originality.ai study published on May 21, 2026 found only 26 public websites had implemented the Universal Commerce Protocol out of more than 3 million scanned, and Walmart reported that Instant Checkout inside ChatGPT converted three times worse than click-out links. Independent analyst Andrew Lipsman questioned the commercial viability of AI shopping agents in October 2025, asking for evidence of a single consumer completing an agentic purchase. Nine months later, the infrastructure has multiplied considerably faster than the transaction volume it was built to carry.

Experian describes itself as a global data and technology company with 25,200 people across 33 countries, listed on the London Stock Exchange under EXPN and headquartered in Dublin. Its advertising-side expansion has been running for years, from the $280 million Tapad acquisition in 2020 to the December 2024 purchase of Audigent. Agent Trust extends that identity franchise from people to the software acting for them, and the Fastly collaboration determines where the question gets asked.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Experian, the London Stock Exchange-listed data and technology company headquartered in Dublin with 25,200 employees across 33 countries, and Fastly, the edge cloud platform trading on Nasdaq as FSLY. Kathleen Peters, Chief Innovation Officer at Experian, and Jeff Alpen, Vice President of Fastly's Partner Ecosystem, are the named executives in the announcement. Skyfire appears as a supported Know Your Agent integration.

What: Fastly has joined the Experian Agent Trust ecosystem. The collaboration places verification of AI agent identity, delegated authority, intent, and payment credentials at the network edge, before requests reach origin infrastructure. Experian contributes Human to Agent Binding, which links verified individuals and their devices to the agents acting for them, together with the Experian Agent Registry and its dynamic trust scores. Fastly contributes edge execution that works with existing APIs, authentication systems, payment workflows, and security controls, plus identity-based access policies, pricing, rate limiting, and transaction approval.

When: The announcement was issued at 9:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time on Friday, July 24, 2026. Experian launched Agent Trust on April 30, 2026 and connected the framework to ServiceNow on May 15, 2026. No availability date or launch customer was disclosed for the Fastly integration.

Where: Experian issued the announcement from Costa Mesa, California. Fastly operates a global edge network. No geographic restriction on the collaboration was specified.

Why: Automated systems now account for 53 percent of web traffic according to Imperva, and 57.4 percent of HTML traffic according to Cloudflare Radar data for the week ending June 5, 2026. Salesforce reported that AI agents influenced $262 billion in holiday sales during 2025, and McKinsey projects agents could drive up to $1 trillion in United States commerce by 2030. Merchants currently lack a reliable way to distinguish an authorized agent acting for a verified customer from an unsigned bot, which leaves both fraud exposure and measurement distortion unresolved.