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TechRadar
TechRadar
Christian Cawley

Meta’s AI bots drain publisher pockets with 9 billion Q2 2026 requests at host expense while returning ZERO traffic — as ChatGPT claims 88% of AI referrals

Meta Meta AI Google
In this photo illustration, the Meta Platforms, Inc. logo is displayed on a smartphone screen.
  • DataDome analysis claims agentic traffic has surged by 45% in Q2 2026
  • Meta AI bots have grown over 163% on the previous quarter
  • The analysis was conducted by bot management and agent control platform DataDome

If you run a website, every crawl costs bandwidth, resources, logging, and creates CDN transactions, and while search engine crawlers offered the promise of sending visitors, AI bots do not.

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