AI Bot Traffic Targeting Publishers Surges 300% in 2025, Akamai Finds

Media Sector Ranks Second Globally in AI Bot Scraping Activity; Referral Traffic From AI Chatbots Trails Google Search by 96%

AI bot activity targeting the publishing industry surged 300% in 2025, with automated scrapers increasingly siphoning content to train large language models and power real-time AI search tools, according to a report released by Akamai Technologies.

The company’s latest State of the Internet report, titled Protecting Publishing: Navigating the AI Bot Era, found that the media sector ranked second globally for AI bot traffic, accounting for 13% of all such activity. Publishing organizations alone accounted for 40% of that share, a concentration Akamai attributed to the high volume of indexable, text-rich content on news and magazine websites.

The report distinguishes between two categories of automated traffic, reshaping how content reaches readers. AI training crawlers and bots that collect data to build or expand language models made up 63% of all AI bot traffic targeting media, with 37% of that subset directed specifically at publishing sites. AI fetchers, which retrieve content in real time to answer user queries within AI assistants, accounted for 24% of media-targeted bot activity, with publishing accounting for 43% of that segment.

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That second category carries a more immediate financial consequence. By delivering answers directly inside AI interfaces, fetchers remove the incentive for users to visit the original source. Akamai’s data showed AI chatbots generated approximately 96% less referral traffic than traditional Google search in the fourth quarter of 2024. For publishers whose advertising and subscription models depend on sustained site visits, the drop represents a structural shift in audience acquisition rather than a temporary fluctuation.

OpenAI generated the highest volume of AI bot traffic aimed at media companies among the firms Akamai tracked. Publishing organizations accounted for 40% of all requests attributed to OpenAI’s crawlers within that segment, per the report.

AI bots are eroding core revenue streams, such as advertising and subscriptions, while driving up infrastructure costs and diminishing brand visibility.Fortunately, our report offers strategies to address this problem.
Patrick Sullivan, CTO, Akamai

The report also outlines emerging bot categories, new security approaches tailored to publishing operations, and a bot management checklist for editorial and technology teams. It is the 12th annual edition of Akamai’s State of the Internet series, which the company compiles from traffic and threat data observed across its global infrastructure.

Akamai did not provide the specific methodology employed to link bot traffic to particular AI firms. Furthermore, it remains unclear how individual publishers assess the financial impact of declining referral traffic, or whether major platforms intend to revise their crawler access protocols in light of these observations.

The move comes as the broader debate over AI training data and publisher compensation remains unresolved in courts and in contract negotiations across the industry.

Akamai Technologies is a cybersecurity and cloud computing company headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Its State of the Internet reports are published annually and draw on traffic data from Akamai’s global content delivery and security infrastructure.