Brotli is an open-source, lossless data compression algorithm that has a higher compression rate than most other methods, like gzip.

How it works

With Brotli Support enabled, the CDN serves Brotli-compressed assets from your origin server and caches them on ​Akamai​ edge servers. If a requesting client like a browser doesn't support Brotli, the edge servers respond with non-Brotli resources.

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Brotli Support doesn't compress resources within the ​Akamai​ CDN in real-time. You need to set up Brotli compression separately on your origin server.

Note that Brotli supports only the compression level 6.

​Akamai​ edge servers send Brotli-compressed content to clients accepting the Brotli algorithm if either of these conditions is met:

• A request comes from a client that accepts Brotli-compression. A request fielded by an edge server contains the Accept-encoding header that includes the br value.

• There's already Brotli-compressed content in their cache.

If the client accepts the Brotli algorithm, but a gzip-compressed version of the requested content is already cached on the ​Akamai​ edge server, the gzip resource is served to save time and bandwidth. If this is the case, you'll need to wait until the time-to-live (TTL) expires on the cached gzip content, before Brotli Support is applied. Once a Brotli-compressed asset is in cache, the CDN serves it to clients that support Brotli.

You can apply compression in an Ion property

If you're using Ion to deliver your site or app, and you want ​Akamai​ to actually compress your content on edge servers—and not just deliver compressed content—you can add other behaviors:

• Adaptive Acceleration. This is default added to an Ion property. It offers several forms of compression, including Brotli.

• Starting from May 31, 2024, Adaptive Image Compression is no longer supported and the image compression configured through this functionality won’t take place. As an alternative, we offer Image & Video Manager. It intelligently and automatically optimizes images and videos on the fly for every user. Reach out to your ​Akamai​ representatives for more information on this product.

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The ESI (Edge Side Includes) and the Akamaizer behaviors are not compatible with Resource Optimizer and Brotli Compression for ION products.