Global AI bot activity surges by 300%, finds Akamai

Akamai released a new State of the Internet (SOTI) report examining how AI bots are reshaping the digital publishing ecosystem. Protecting Publishing: Navigating the AI Bot Era finds that AI bot activity surged by 300% in 2025, with the media industry, which includes publishing companies — ranking second globally with 13% of AI bot traffic.

AI bots overwhelmingly targeted publishing organisations, which made up 40% of that activity. This concentration highlights how content-rich websites have become prime targets for automated scraping.

Companies increasingly deploy AI bots to collect data for large language models (LLMs) and to power AI-driven search tools. While AI training crawlers generate the most automated traffic, AI fetchers — bots that retrieve content in real time to answer user queries — pose a more immediate threat. By delivering answers directly through AI assistants, these tools reduce the need for users to visit original content creators’ websites.

This ...