In Graphic Detail: New data shows publishers face growing AI bot, third-party scraper activity
A third-party scraper economy is emerging beneath the big AI companies, making it harder than ever for publishers to know who is taking their content, let alone stop them.
“What’s changed is the separation of roles. The entity extracting the data is often not the one using or monetizing it. That abstraction layer is what’s enabling third-party resale markets to scale,” Brent Maynard, senior director of security technology and strategy at content delivery network company Akamai, said. “We’re hearing this directly from publishers. One large publisher described it as: We’re not being scraped by one company anymore, we’re being harvested by an ecosystem.”
Digiday has compiled four graphs revealing how AI web scraping is evolving, and what it means for publishers:
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