Akamai has released a new Internet Status of the Internet (SOI) report examining the impact that AI bots are having on the digital publishing industry. The document, titled Protecting the Publishing Sector: Navigating the Era of AI Bots, reveals that activity from these bots surged by 300% throughout 2025. Additionally, the media sector—including publishers—is identified as the second most affected globally, accounting for 13% of AI bot-generated traffic.
According to the report, publishers were the primary target, accounting for 40% of all automated interactions. This strong concentration highlights that pages rich in high-quality content have become priority targets for automated scraping.
More organizations are increasingly using AI bots to collect data for training advanced language models (LLMs) and to fuel search engines powered by this technology. While AI crawlers used for training AI are responsible for the highest volume of automated traffic, bots designed to retrieve content in real-time—and directly respond to user queries—pose a more immediate threat. By providing answers without accessing the original websites, these systems reduce user visits to content creators’ sites.
This shift is already impacting the publishing industry’s outcomes. The SOI report shows that AI chatbots generated approximately 96% less referral traffic than traditional Google search in Q4 2024, significantly reducing a critical source of audience and revenue.
Some key findings include:
- OpenAI leads the impact: OpenAI generated the highest volume of AI bot traffic directed at media outlets. Within that traffic, publishers accounted for 40% of all OpenAI requests.
- AI training crawlers dominate: AI training crawlers made up 63% of all AI bots targeting the media sector, with 37% focused specifically on publishers.
- Content retrievers for AI are on the rise: Content retrieval bots for AI represented 25% of all AI bot activity targeting the media, with the publishing sector representing 43% of that segment.
“The fundamental change in how people now obtain information is impacting publishers,” says Patrick Sullivan, Director of Technology, Security Strategy at Akamai. “AI bots are undermining key revenue streams like advertising and subscriptions while increasing infrastructure costs and decreasing brand visibility. Fortunately, our report offers strategies to address this challenge.”
The Protecting the Publishing Sector: Navigating the Era of AI Bots report also discusses emerging categories of AI bots, highlights new security approaches for the publishing industry, and provides a practical AI bot management checklist to help organizations mitigate risk and safeguard their content.
Now in its twelfth edition, Akamai’s SOI reports continue to deliver critical insights into cybersecurity trends and web performance, derived from observed attacks within Akamai’s cybersecurity infrastructure, which handles a significant volume of global web traffic.

