Amazon and Meta Bots Now Account for Most Website Visits

Data from 51Degrees, covering three billion website visits in the year to 29 May 2026, shows AmazonBot accounting for more than 4% of all web visits (6.43 million sessions on 29 May alone) and Meta-External-Agent almost 3% (4.23 million). Together the two AI bots generated 63% of sessions from the 72 AI-related bots tracked, with AhrefsBot and BingBot making up the rest of the top four at 85% combined. AI bot traffic rose 62.5% year on year and now represents 13% of web sessions, up from 8%. James Rosewell, CEO of 51Degrees, framed it as "a huge licensing revenue opportunity" for publishers but "a growing and unwanted burden, particularly for smaller, independent players". Known Agents data shows publishers only block around 21% of AI scraper bots in robots.txt.

The crux

The machine audience is now structurally bigger than any single human audience source, and publishers are neither fully blocking it nor fully monetising it, which is precisely the dual-audience problem USA Today Co. flagged last week.

Sell-side read

Bot traffic is now a revenue line and a cost line at once; audit your robots.txt coverage (21% average is not a strategy) and price crawler access the way 51Degrees and Tollbit are proposing.

Watch

Whether bot-blocking or bot-monetisation products (tiered crawling fees, licensing-for-access) become a standard publisher P&L line within two quarters.

Sell-side read

Bot traffic is now a revenue line and a cost line at once; audit your robots.txt coverage (21% average is not a strategy) and price crawler access the way 51Degrees and Tollbit are proposing.

Watch

Whether bot-blocking or bot-monetisation products (tiered crawling fees, licensing-for-access) become a standard publisher P&L line within two quarters.

Watch

Whether bot-blocking or bot-monetisation products (tiered crawling fees, licensing-for-access) become a standard publisher P&L line within two quarters.