Back in July, when Bay City News Foundation first began to track AI bot traffic on its news website, LocalNewsMatters.org, the referral rate of humans
AI Chatbots Are Blocked by 67% of Top News Sites, Relying Instead on Low-Quality Sources
By Jack Brewster, Zack Fishman, and Isaiah Glick | Published on Sept. 16, 2024
Blocking AI crawlers backfired: news publishers lost 23% of traffic
Large language models reshaped news consumption patterns starting in August 2024, but publishers who blocked AI bots experienced worse outcomes than those who didn't, according to research published December 31, 2025, by Rutgers Business School and The Wharton School.
Scientists Created an Entire Social Network Where Every User Is a Bot, and Something Wild Happened
Researchers simulated a social media platform that was populated entirely by AI to see if we can stop them from turning into echo chambers.
How AI bots quietly dismantle paywalls via web search
ChatGPT and other AI chatbots have figured out how to get around paywalls through "live" web search—and they're doing it systematically and quietly across major publications, new Digital Digging research reveals.
AI Scraping Bots Are Breaking Open Libraries, Archives, and Museums
"This is a moment where that community feels collectively under threat and isn't sure what the process is for solving the problem.”
Unauthorised AI Bots on Reddit are Eroding Sociality
Where do we go if online discourse is overrun by AI bots?
Getting Bots to Respect Boundaries
Getting Bots to Respect Boundaries How AI Crawlers Are Straining Web Infrastructure Audrey Hingle January 2026 Image by Janet Turra & Cambridge Diversity Fund betterimagesofai.org creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 Contents Introduction: Setting up the Problem 3 Understandin...
Track, control, and optimize for AI agents and bots | Known Agents (formerly Dark Visitors)
Use Known Agents to turn the rising wave of AI agents, LLM assistants, and other bots crawling your website into a new growth channel for your business
Ultimate Block List to Stop AI Bots | Perishable Press
More than you might think, AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) bots are crawling your site and scraping your content. They are...
Exclusive: It’s bots vs. reporters at the AP
The tensions inside the wire service reveal a broader conflict playing out across the media over how AI should be applied within journalism.
Early rogue AI agent activity and attempts to hack found on urlquery.net
We found evidence on urlquery that AI agents were active earlier than previously reported and attempted hacks against public data providers.
May 2025 — AI Misinformation Monitor of Leading AI Chatbots
Every month, NewsGuard’s team of expert analysts audit the top AI models to see how well they respond to prompts in the news. On average, this month they failed to counter disinformation from Russia’s Pravda Network 24 percent of the time, either spreading false claims or failing to respond. The Pravda network was designed to infect the AI models.
AI is eating website traffic, websites are blocking AI – and reliable information is getting harder to find
AI has broken the economic bargain behind the web, and everybody is losing.
Over 50 Percent of the Internet Is Now AI Slop, New Data Finds
New research from the firm Graphite found that around half of all articles on the internet are AI generated.
We tested how AI chatbots would handle foreign propaganda. They did surprisingly well
In a test, popular AI chatbots mostly debunked falsehoods spread by other countries and avoided uncritically spreading falsehoods better than search engines. AI summaries above search results fared worse.
AI-driven Bot Attacks Surged 12.5x According to Thales Bad Bot Report
Bots now dominate the internet, accounting for over half of all traffic, with 40% classified as malicious.AI is erasing the line between legitimate and maliciou
