Leading web‑scraping companies say their bots only collect publicly available information, despite lawsuits from major platforms. Executives from Bright Data, ScrapingBee and Oxylabs stress compliance with open‑web principles and note legitimate uses such as cybersecurity and investigative journalism. The growing demand for AI‑trained data has spurred a new market, with over 40 firms offering bots for AI training and a nascent marketing approach called generative engine optimization. Industry leaders predict this trend will intensify through 2026, creating both opportunities and challenges for publishers and regulators. Read more →

New data shows AI bots are rapidly increasing their share of internet traffic, often bypassing standard safeguards like robots.txt. Publishers and website owners are confronting a sophisticated arms race as bots disguise themselves as human browsers and employ advanced scraping techniques. Companies such as TollBit, Cloudflare and others are offering tools to detect, block, or monetize bot access, while a growing market promotes services that help content appear in AI-driven search results. The shift is reshaping how the web functions and creating new revenue streams for digital publishers. Read more →

Quora's Poe app is adding group chat capabilities, allowing users worldwide to start conversations with up to 200 participants and collaborate with more than 200 AI models—ranging from text generators to image, video and audio tools—within a single thread. The rollout follows OpenAI's recent pilots of group chats for ChatGPT in several markets and is positioned as a step toward richer, collaborative AI experiences for families, friends and teams. Read more →

Amazon has sent a cease‑and‑desist letter to Perplexity, demanding that its AI‑powered shopping assistant, Comet, be removed from the Amazon marketplace. The e‑commerce giant warned that the bot violates its terms of service by failing to identify itself as an agent. Perplexity responded with a blog post defending its approach, arguing that the bot operates under human direction and therefore should inherit the same permissions as the user. Amazon countered that other third‑party agents openly identify themselves and that Perplexity could simply comply. The dispute revives earlier controversy over Perplexity’s web‑scraping practices and raises broader questions about the future of agentic AI on commercial platforms. Read more →

Wikimedia’s senior director of product, Marshall Miller, says the rise of generative‑AI chatbots and AI‑generated search summaries is driving a notable decline in Wikipedia page views. After improving bot detection, the foundation reports an 8 percent year‑over‑year drop in traffic, which it attributes to users receiving answers directly from AI‑powered search results. Miller cautions that reduced visits could affect volunteer contributions and funding, threatening the site’s hallmark standards of verifiability and neutrality. He urges AI developers and search platforms to direct users back to the original Wikipedia articles for full context. Read more →