AI bots are undermining the financial foundations of the publishing industry.
That statement isn’t clickbait. It’s the reality that is rapidly reshaping the publishing business.
As audiences turn to AI chatbots for instant answers and information, they are increasingly bypassing the original sources. This dramatically impacts the business models that the publishing industry has relied on for decades: subscriptions, ad engagement, and brand loyalty.
According to research from TollBit, referral traffic from AI chatbots was 96% lower than traffic from traditional Google search in Q4 2024. As traffic falls through the basement, so does revenue, creating an existential threat to the publishing industry.
New research: How AI bots are targeting publishing
The latest State of the Internet (SOTI) Security report, Protecting Publishing: Navigating the AI Bot Era, is now live. It explores how AI bots affect revenue, visibility, and brand awareness across the publishing industry — and how organizations can protect their economic and reputational health in the AI era.
The scale of the bot surge
The SOTI report reveals a number of eye-opening insights about the publishing industry, including findings related to:
The escalating threat of AI bots
AI fetcher bots that grab and repurpose content
The undermining of the publishing’s revenue mechanisms
Finding an option to blocking by default
The escalating threat of AI bots
We tracked a 300% surge in Akamai-categorized AI bot activity in 2025. The media industry, including the publishing sub-vertical, ranked second after the commerce vertical in this activity.
AI fetcher bots that grab and repurpose content
AI fetcher bots that collect and repurpose web content in real time pose a growing risk to the publishing industry. Fetchers constitute 25.28% of Akamai-categorized AI bots.
The undermining of publishing’s revenue mechanisms
AI bots are undermining the revenue mechanisms that publishing relies on —
including paywalls, subscriptions, and advertising — while driving up operational costs and tarnishing brand reputations.
Finding an option to blocking by default
Blocking all AI bots by default may not be the answer. A variety of options are available to mitigate AI bot traffic, including innovative monetization solutions.
How AI is reshaping the attack surface
We documented how AI bots are driving new forms of digital fraud in our 2025 SOTI Digital Fraud and Abuse report. This new SOTI report unpacks the trend of AI bots specifically targeting the publishing industry and outlines strategies for addressing the threat.
Why are AI bots specifically targeting the publishing industry?
AI has fundamentally changed the way people find and consume content online. Users are increasingly turning to AI platforms for instant answers and information. AI bots play a central role in this, collecting proprietary content — often without crediting or compensating the original creators — that is served up by the AI platform. For the publishing industry, this reduces revenue-generating traffic and subscriptions, while eroding brand visibility.
Major publishing companies, including Ziff Davis and The New York Times, have taken legal action to defend their copyrights by filing copyright infringement lawsuits against OpenAI, claiming it used their published articles to train large language models (LLMs) without authorization.
Akamai research shows that between July and December 2025, OpenAI, Meta, and ByteDance were the top three vendors/owners of AI agents that impacted media companies.
Beware the fetchers
Different types of AI bots have different behaviors and some have a greater impact on publishing’s bottom lines. Our research reveals that AI fetchers are particularly concerning because they collect information from web pages in real time in response to a specific user request. As fewer users click through to publishing websites, page views and referral traffic plummet.
This underscores the importance of having visibility into AI traffic and understanding which AI bots are crawling a site, what content they’re collecting, and who is operating them.
Second-order impacts to publishing
Lost revenue isn’t the only threat posed by AI bots. Large-scale web scraping can lead to increased infrastructure expenses, including higher server, cloud, and content delivery network (CDN) costs. The extra strain of unwanted automated traffic can degrade site performance, leading to latency and a poor user experience.
Web scraping can also inflict reputational damage on publishing companies when their content is republished on impersonation, aggregation, or counterfeit sites. And these scrapers have the potential to introduce security vulnerabilities that could do damage down the road.
Understand protection strategies
Although blocking all AI bots may seem like a quick fix, it can backfire. Some AI companies may be open to partnership or licensing opportunities, which can create new revenue streams while making published content even more visible online.
To maintain control of their content and protect their businesses, publishing companies must have the ability to view, understand, and manage AI bot activity. Monitoring bot traffic to distinguish legitimate, user-driven agents from unauthorized agents is critical to make informed decisions that mitigate risk while keeping the door open to beneficial bots.
Read the SOTI Security Insights Series report to learn how to implement a trust-and-commerce layer that makes approved agent access attributable and transactable. Publishing companies do not have to choose between either blocking everything or accepting unpaid use.
Partners can help
Partnerships with platforms such as Skyfire and TollBit enable content licensing and fair value exchange. Skyfire allows publishing companies to couple access decisions with monetization in a way that is both automated and auditable. TollBit enables a fair exchange of value between AI companies and websites by transforming scraping into sanctioned, revenue-generating access.
Together, these solutions empower publishing companies to reclaim control of their content and turn access into revenue.
Want more details?
Download the new SOTI report: Protecting Publishing: Navigating the AI Bot Era.
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