Akamai released a new State of the Internet (SOTI) report examining how AI bots are reshaping the digital publishing ecosystem. Protecting Publishing: Navigating the AI Bot Era finds that AI bot activity surged by 300% in 2025, with the media industry, which includes publishing companies — ranking second globally with 13% of AI bot traffic.
AI bots overwhelmingly targeted publishing organizations, which made up 40% of that activity. This concentration highlights how content-rich websites have become prime targets for automated scraping.
Companies increasingly deploy AI bots to collect data for large language models (LLMs) and to power AI-driven search tools. While AI training crawlers generate the most automated traffic, AI fetchers — bots that retrieve content in real time to answer user queries — pose a more immediate threat. By delivering answers directly through AI assistants, these tools reduce the need for users to visit original content creators’ websites.
This shift is already impacting the publishing industry’s bottom lines. The SOTI report found that AI chatbots drove approximately 96% less referral traffic than traditional Google search in Q4 2024, sharply reducing a critical source of audience and revenue.
Additional key findings include:
- OpenAI leads in impact: OpenAI generated the highest volume of AI bot traffic targeting media companies. Within that traffic, publishing organizations accounted for 40% of all OpenAI requests.
- AI training crawlers dominate: AI training crawlers made up 63% of all AI bots targeting the media industry, with 37% focused specifically on publishing.
- AI fetchers are on the rise: AI fetchers represented 24% of all AI bot activity targeting media, with publishing accounting for 43% of that segment.
“The fundamental shift in how people get their information is impacting publishers,” said Mr. Patrick Sullivan, Akamai’s Chief Technology Officer, Security Strategy. “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.”
Protecting Publishing: Navigating the AI Bot Era also examines emerging AI bot categories, highlights new security approaches for the publishing industry, and provides a practical AI bot management checklist to help organizations mitigate risk and protect their content.
Now in their 12th year, Akamai’s SOTI reports continue to offer critical insights on cybersecurity trends and web performance, drawn from attacks viewed across Akamai’s cybersecurity infrastructure, which handles a significant portion of global web traffic.
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