Imagine logging onto your favorite news site or e-commerce platform, only to discover that the majority of visitors aren’t human at all. According to a new report from web-scraping analytics firm TollBit, this scenario is rapidly becoming reality. The company’s data reveals that in the fourth quarter of 2025, an average of one out of every 31 visits to its customers’ websites came from AI scraping bots – a dramatic increase from just one out of every 200 visits in the first quarter of that year.
The Bot Traffic Explosion
This surge in AI bot activity represents more than just a technical curiosity. “The majority of the Internet is going to be bot traffic in the future,” says Toshit Pangrahi, cofounder and CEO of TollBit. “It’s not just a copyright problem, there is a new visitor emerging on the Internet.” The data, shared with WIRED by Internet infrastructure company Akamai, shows that training-related bot traffic has been rising steadily since July 2025, while global activity from bots fetching web content for AI agents is also on the upswing.
What’s particularly concerning for website owners is how sophisticated these bots have become. TollBit’s study notes that the behavior of some AI agents is now almost indistinguishable from human web traffic. More than 13 percent of bot requests were bypassing robots.txt – a file that websites use to indicate which pages bots should avoid – with that share increasing 400 percent from the second to fourth quarter of 2025.
The Business Implications of Bot Dominance
Robert Blumofe, Akamai’s chief technology officer, frames the situation starkly: “AI is changing the web as we know it. The ensuing arms race will determine the future look, feel, and functionality of the web, as well as the basics of doing business.” This isn’t just about publishers protecting their content – it’s about every business that relies on web traffic for revenue.
The response has been equally dramatic. TollBit reported a 336 percent increase in the number of websites making attempts to block AI bots over the past year. But as sites try to assert control over how bots access their content, scraping techniques are getting more sophisticated. Some bots disguise themselves by making their traffic appear like it’s coming from a normal web browser or send requests designed to mimic how humans normally interact with websites.
New Business Models Emerge
Rather than fighting this trend, some companies are embracing it as a new business opportunity. TollBit markets tools that website owners can use to charge AI scrapers for accessing their content, while other firms like Cloudflare offer similar solutions. “Anyone who relies on human web traffic – starting with publishers, but basically everyone – is going to be impacted,” Pangrahi explains. “There needs to be a faster way to have that machine-to-machine, programmatic exchange of value.”
This arms race has spawned an entire industry. TollBit’s report found more than 40 companies now marketing bots that can collect web content for AI training or other purposes. The rise of AI-powered search engines and tools like OpenClaw – formerly known as Moltbot – are likely helping drive up demand for these services.
The User Experience Revolution
While some companies focus on blocking or monetizing bot traffic, others see an opportunity to transform how websites interact with visitors. Enter Fibr AI, a startup that recently raised $5.7 million in seed funding led by Accel. Their approach? Using AI agents to transform static websites into personalized, one-to-one experiences for each visitor.
“Advertising today is one-to-one, but when users land on a website it becomes one-to-many,” explains Prayank Swaroop, partner at Accel. “Fibr’s ability to turn that dynamic into one-to-one personalization stood out because it removed the agency and engineering bottlenecks.” The platform operates as a layer on top of existing websites, connecting to advertising, analytics, and customer data systems to run thousands of micro-experiments in parallel.
Ankur Goyal, co-founder and CEO of Fibr AI, describes their approach: “We are [the] software, and the agency is the workforce of agents we are deploying, allowing Fibr AI to run thousands of experiments in parallel rather than a few dozen each year.” With 12 enterprise customers including banks and healthcare providers, Fibr AI represents a new frontier in web personalization.
The Monetization Dilemma
As AI becomes more integrated into our online experiences, companies face crucial decisions about how to monetize these technologies. Anthropic recently announced that its AI chatbot Claude will remain ad-free, taking a clear stance against the advertising approach being tested by competitors like OpenAI, which began testing banner ads in ChatGPT’s low-cost tier in January 2026.
Anthropic’s position is unequivocal: “There are many good places for advertising. A conversation with Claude is not one of them.” The company argues that “users shouldn’t have to second-guess whether an AI is genuinely helping them or subtly steering the conversation towards something monetizable.”
Even OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman expressed reservations about mixing ads with AI conversations, calling the combination “uniquely unsettling” and saying he would not like having to “figure out exactly how much was who paying here to influence what I’m being shown.”
Giving Users Control
As AI features become more prevalent in everyday tools, user control emerges as a critical concern. Mozilla is addressing this head-on with new AI controls in Firefox 148, allowing users to easily enable or disable AI features like chatbots, page summaries, translations, and tab grouping. “We believe choice is more important than ever as AI becomes a part of people’s browsing experiences,” says Ajit Varma, Head of Firefox. “What matters to us is giving people control, no matter how they feel about AI.”
The Future of Web Interaction
The web-scraping wars are creating what some are calling “generative engine optimization” or GEO – a new marketing channel focused on optimizing content so it appears prominently in AI tools. “We’re essentially seeing the rise of a new marketing channel,” says Uri Gafni, chief business officer of Brandlight, a company that specializes in this approach.
“This will only intensify in 2026, and we’re going to see this rollout kind of as a full-on marketing channel, with search, ads, media, and commerce converging,” Gafni predicts. The question for businesses isn’t whether to engage with this new reality, but how to do so effectively while maintaining user trust and delivering genuine value.
As AI bots continue to reshape the Internet landscape, companies must navigate a complex web of technical challenges, ethical considerations, and business opportunities. Those who succeed will be the ones who recognize that the future of the web isn’t about humans versus bots – it’s about creating intelligent systems that serve both human needs and machine requirements in a balanced, sustainable ecosystem.