WTF are gray bots?

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

Spiders, crawlers and scrapers have long plagued digital media. But as generative AI mutates the threat for advertisers and publishers one security firm has created the term “gray bots” to illustrate the blurred line between real and fake traffic — and between legitimate activity and harmful exploitation.

They’re not 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.

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