When bots look like buyers: agentic traffic causing new publisher headaches

Agentic visitors are becoming a gnarlier problem for some publishers. The real issue is measurement: without a clear way to separate agentic visitors from humans, some buyers are getting jittery — and a few are already pulling ad spend.

The term agentic visitors describes when AI assistants or automated agents — like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and now its browser Atlas, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews — visit and read a publisher’s content on behalf of a human user. Often, without generating a traditional pageview or ad impression so publishers can’t make money on the visit.

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