Bots now make up about half of all web traffic. Are they a threat to block or an audience to win? 

For most of the web's history, the deal was simple. Search engines pointed people to websites, and those visits paid for the content through advertising and subscriptions. AI is rewriting that arrangement, and the clearest place to see it is in who, or what, is showing up at the door.

Akamai says it now handles more than 150 billion bot requests a day, with AI bot traffic climbing more than 300% year over year. Bots account for roughly half of all internet traffic. On this episode of The Media Copilot podcast, Pete Pachal talks with two Akamai executives who sit on opposite sides of that shift: Kim Salem-Jackson, the company's chief marketing officer, and Patrick Sullivan, its CTO of security strategy. Their jobs once had little to do with each other. Now they are working the same problem from two directions.

Key Takeaways

• AI bot traffic is up more than 300% a year, and bots now make up about half of all web traffic

• For some sites, the most valuable visitor may now a bot, not a person

• The difference between training bots, retrieval bots, and malicious bots

• Marketers are starting to treat LLMs as an audience to court, each with its own personality

• The same crawler can be an asset or a threat depending on whether your business runs on visibility or on traffic

• Pay-per-click for bots exists, but licensing deals are still the more common path, and enforcement rests with publishers rather than the CDN

• A model reads only about 1% of a webpage, so anything below the token budget is invisible to AI

• A separate bot-optimized site can raise AI citations sharply, which Akamai puts at 85%

• Wikipedia, LinkedIn, YouTube and Reddit carry outsized weight in what LLMs cite

🔗 About the 👤 Guests

Kim Salem Jackson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimsalemjackson/

Patrick Sullivan LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patricksully 

Akamai Technologies https://www.akamai.com

About the show: To explore more conversations like this and see what’s new, visit the Media Copilot website at mediacopilot.ai. You’ll find new episodes, expanded resources, and tools designed for journalists, communicators, and media leaders navigating the fast-changing world of AI. It’s the home base for everything Media Copilot and it’s just getting started.