Marketers face dilemma around rising bot and AI web traffic
Bot traffic is rising for e-commerce brands and interfering with retargeting strategies. But marketers are split on whether they should remain open to AI visitors or work harder to block.
The rapid increase in traffic from AI scrapers, agents, and common bots is affecting publishers and marketers alike. While some marketers view the surge as beneficial, others are forced to modify their digital marketing strategies to filter out unwanted bots. Automated agents and bots now make up over half of all web requests, according to Cloudflare.
This development poses challenges for media companies whose content is being scraped and repurposed by Large Language Models (LLM) tools. For some brands, however, the influx presents advantages. Chad Keller, co-founder of Mellow Sleep, a direct-to-consumer pillow brand, explained that they prefer classifying automated traffic rather than blocking it entirely.
Keller highlighted that AI assistants are sending them traffic that converts at a rate several times higher than their site average. Blocking all non-human agents would, in fact, cost them more than it would save.
Written by urgent.news from Digiday's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
