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

• 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.

Analysis in a report from cybersecurity firm DataDome has shown that while bots from Meta AI have increased activity, they’re not delivering any significant returns to websites.

Conversely, ChatGPT crawlers have reduced in traffic, but are sending more referrals.

AI agent traffic is growing

While Meta AI is usually considered to be the “chatbotwithin Facebook” it seems that it is becoming something more – and the emergence of the Meta-WebIndexer bot (which grew 163% on Q1) suggests that Meta may be indexing a...

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