Publishers aren’t the only parties impacted by a ramp-up of traffic from AI scrapers, agents and common-or-garden bots. But while some marketers consider the AI influx a net benefit, others are having to rebuild their digital marketing strategies to keep out bad bots.
Together, automated agents and bots now account for more than half of all web requests, according to Cloudflare. For media companies concerned their content is being scraped and regurgitated by LLM tools, that’s a development without much upside. At some brands it’s seen as a plus.
“We’re less interested in blocking automated traffic than in classifying it,” said Chad Keller, co-founder of Mellow Sleep, a direct-to-consumer pillow brand. “AI assistants are already sending us traffic that converts several times better than our site average. The blunt instrument of blocking every non-human agent would cost us more than it saves.”
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