No Free Crawls: Akamai, TollBit, and Skyfire Turn Traffic into Revenue

Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the cybersecurity and cloud computing company that powers and protects business online, today announced technical alliances with TollBit and Skyfire to give publishers and content owners multiple options to monetize AI bot traffic. 

Handling more than 150 billion bot requests across its network every day, Akamai leverages its unmatched scale to help customers block the most aggressive forms of content scraping. As the number of AI-driven scraping agents increases, Akamai is helping organizations to protect their content, enforce fair usage, and unlock new revenue opportunities with its bot and abuse protection solutions.

“We’re excited to offer our customers greater flexibility in managing and monetizing AI traffic—without locking them into a single platform,” said Patrick Sullivan, CTO of Security Strategy at Akamai. “By partnering with TollBit and Skyfire, we empower our customers to take control—whether they choose to block scrapers, allow trusted agents, or charge for premium access—all in real time and at the edge.”

Partnership with TollBit

TollBit enables a fair exchange of value between AI companies and websites by transforming scraping into sanctioned, revenue-generating access. Over 3,000 publishers and websites use the TollBit platform globally to monitor over 1.5B quarterly bot scrapes, set access terms, and receive direct compensation when AI bots and agents access their site.

Purpose-built for publishers and website owners, TollBit installs a website “tollbooth” that authenticates AI traffic, provides governance, and monetizes data access — while giving AI agents a scalable way to pay for what they use. Site owners stay in control with full visibility and the ability to define their own pricing and policies for AI visitors.

Through this partnership, Akamai’s powerful detection and enforcement at the edge will allow publishers to identify and redirect more AI bots to the TollBit paywall, adding to the roughly 450M quarterly bots redirected now. TollBit is the trusted transaction layer for the agent economy — where autonomous visitors and AI companies access content responsibly, sites are compensated transparently, and the online economy remains sustainable.

“Site owners deserve fair compensation for how their content is used in the AI ecosystem. By pairing TollBit’s analytics and monetization tools with Akamai’s scale and detection capabilities, we’re enabling a shift from unauthorized scraping to sustainable monetization” said Toshit Panigrahi, Co-Founder and CEO, TollBit.

Partnership with Skyfire

Skyfire offers verified identity, tokenization, and “Know Your Agent” (KYA) capabilities to the AI bot ecosystem. When an AI agent requests access to Akamai-protected content, the agent delivers verified identity information about the principal user behind the agent as well as the AI platform — allowing low-latency, secure access at the edge. These tokens don’t require a redirection or proxy service between the agent and the website. The token-based identity system gives website owners full transparency without disintermediation into which agents access their content, under what identity, and for what purpose.

KYA identity tokens are used to access content, and are also used to identify known traffic to ecommerce properties, financial websites, and a host of other web properties to avoid false positive bot blocking. 

After verification, website owners can optionally require payment for access. Skyfire allows instant payment for access with its integrated payment token, delivering trusted access with payment assurance. By integrating Akamai’s detection and enforcement capabilities with Skyfire’s identity and transaction model, publishers and other web properties gain the tools to both understand and monetize AI traffic in a secure, controlled manner.

“Skyfire brings accountability and trust to the fast-moving world of AI scraping. By combining our KYA framework with Akamai’s advanced bot detection and massive scale, we’re giving publishers the power to define how their content is accessed and monetized,” said Craig DeWitt, Founder of Skyfire.