Web Application & API Protection (WAAP) platforms defend public-facing applications and APIs against exploitation at runtime, unifying web application firewalls (WAF), bot management, DDoS protection, and API security into a single edge service. Core capabilities include OWASP Top 10 rule enforcement, credential-stuffing and scraping prevention, API schema validation and abuse detection, rate limiting and geographic controls, virtual patching for unpatched vulnerabilities, TLS termination and inspection, and machine-learning–based traffic anomaly detection. WAAP consolidates the prior generation of standalone WAF, bot management, DDoS, and API-security point products as those markets converged onto unified edge platforms. Leading vendors include Cloudflare, Akamai, Imperva, F5, AWS WAF+Shield, Fastly, Radware, and API-specific vendors such as Wallarm and Salt Security.