More than 300 publishers press Congress on stealth bot bill
Publishers are lobbying for a federal bill that would require stealth crawlers to identify themselves and disclose their purpose.
bots
News UK finds one in five website visits came from bots
News UK CTO Tom Jackson said about 20% of traffic over six months was non-human, with 6% of total traffic blocked as malicious bots.
DataDome says bad bot traffic jumped 124% as AI agents reach login pages
DataDome found malicious bot traffic grew nine times faster than human traffic, while AI agents increasingly reached login and payment flows.
Cloudflare tightens AI crawler controls for ad-supported publisher sites
Cloudflare will block training and agent crawlers by default on ad-supported pages as it moves toward pay-per-use compensation.
Publishers don’t need to trust AI companies to work with them
The instinct to block AI bots understandable, but verifying bots protects your content while letting you compete for AI visibility.
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IAB drafts AI advertising measurement framework as agents replace human clicks
The trade group plans to publish the framework Nov. 12 as publishers push for credit when AI systems help shape a purchase.
Cloudflare says blocking AI crawlers is pushing publishers into licensing deals
Cloudflare says default AI crawler blocking is creating scarcity that pushes AI companies to license publisher content, and pay-per-use is next.
Judge allows Reddit’s data scraping lawsuit against Perplexity to procee
A Manhattan judge advanced most of Reddit's copyright and conspiracy claims against Perplexity and three data-scraping firms over AI training data.
Time starts building ads for AI agents as bot traffic overtakes humans
Time is placing brand FAQs inside markdown pages aimed at AI crawlers, with Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute among its first buyers.
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.