Meta now drives most AI agent traffic while sending publishers few visitors
DataDome logged 17.7 billion AI agent requests in Q2 2026, with Meta's crawlers generating most of the volume and almost no referral traffic back to sites.

DataDome logged 17.7 billion AI agent requests in Q2 2026, with Meta's crawlers generating most of the volume and almost no referral traffic back to sites.

Two major publishers are blocking all AI bots by default and only letting approved crawlers through.

For the first time, bots account for more web traffic than humans, according to Cloudflare data.

The move signals a push to bring industry-wide accountability to AI adoption in newsrooms.
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