WTF are gray bots?

A new category of bots is quietly becoming one of the biggest forces reshaping the web: gray bots.

They’re not yet a household name like “generative AI” or “AI agents,” but gray bots are already far beyond niche. Experts see the growing wave as an urgent challenge for the digital economy. Recent cybersecurity reports show some websites are seeing millions of scraper bot requests each month largely tied to generative AI activity. Others are noticing AI crawlers are driving more general invalid traffic and GIVT-related ad request volumes.

Between December and February, cybersecurity firm Barracuda — which coined the term “gray bots” in an April report — tracked millions of generative AI bot requests, including one web app that saw nearly 10 million in a month and another that logged over 500,000 in a single day. The most active were Anthropic’s ClaudeBot and TikTok’s ByteSpider, according to researchers.

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