For the last thirty years, we have been focused on keeping bots out. Now, we have started to focus on keeping them in.

For the last thirty years, digital marketers have been focused on keeping bots out. The very term “bots” had a negative connotation, and the layers and layers of protection we’ve built are now a liability to brands’ web stacks.

This isn’t because security stopped mattering… It hasn’t. But all of the CAPTCHAs, rate limits, login walls, fingerprinting and internet fortresses we’ve tried to build must be re-examined in the modern context of AI. Brands may be doing themselves a disservice with the default position that automated traffic is hostile until proven otherwise.

My co-founder has been preaching about this for years, and I’ve nodded along for most of them. Only recently have I felt the upside-downness of it, and how much of what we built to protect brands now works against us.

Bots are now 53% of web traffic — that’s the stat everyone repeats on LinkedIn. Although if you double-click, the context is even more important since agents are doing way more than they used to. Often, they don’t just scan sites; they interact and execute workflows, which makes good and bad traffic harder to tell apart.

That is where the problem lies and what we need to solve for — Your defenses can’t tell the difference between someone scraping your catalog nefariously and someone’s assistant trying to buy from it. Same door, same knock.

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