A fifth of News UK's traffic was not human

About a fifth of all News UK traffic in the last six months was non-human, chief technology officer Tom Jackson revealed, though he said bot attacks were higher before the publisher deployed bot-protection software Netacea. Around a third of that non-human total is now blocked as malicious, meaning "6% of our traffic we're currently blocking," Jackson told a panel on the "AI traffic dilemma" at Press Gazette's Future of Media Technology Conference. News UK has moved from an AI block list to an "allow list" of scrapers it permits, which Jackson admitted is still "not really nuanced and sophisticated enough." At the Daily Mail, director of SEO and editorial e-commerce Carly Steven said the publisher is moving from monitoring to enforcing, but is now testing a more nuanced approach where it helps brand partners become more visible in large language models. "This isn't a defensive play. This is actually opening up new conversations around revenue, and that's really exciting," Steven said.

The crux

Even premium publishers are discovering that a fifth of their audience is bots, so reach and CPM figures are inflated by non-human impressions - and the strategic fight is shifting from blocking to monetizing legitimate AI-agent and LLM visibility.

Sell-side read

Audit your own traffic for non-human share before you sell audiences, because buyers increasingly discount bot-inflated reach; the emerging opportunity is charging for LLM visibility, as the Daily Mail's early "very positive" commercial tests suggest.

Watch

Whether LLM-visibility revenue products scale beyond the Daily Mail's early tests into a repeatable commercial line.