The State of The Agentic Web

The latest State of the Bots report from TollBit reveals a stark truth: we are witnessing the violent death of the traditional web’s economic model and the emergence of an entirely new digital economy.

The numbers are devastating, AI applications drive a mere 0.04% of referral traffic back to publishers while consuming their content at unprecedented scales. This isn’t a disruption; it’s an extinction event.

But within this collapse lies the blueprint for transformation.

The data reveals not just how the old model is dying, but how an entirely new infrastructure—the agentic web—is being born.

The Great Extraction

The crawl-to-referral ratios tell a story of pure extraction that would make even the most aggressive strip-mining operation blush.

Anthropic scrapes content 8,692 times for every single visit it sends back.

Perplexity’s ratio stands at 369:1. OpenAI, despite its partnership programs and promises, maintains a 179:1 ratio.

For comparison, Bing—hardly a paragon of traffic generation—manages 11:1.

This isn’t sustainable.

It’s not meant to be.

These AI systems aren’t broken search engines; they’re a fundamentally different species of technology that consumes information to produce intelligence, not to distribute attention.

Publishers waiting for AI referral traffic are like farmers waiting for locusts to pollinate their crops.

The most telling statistic: while AI bot traffic now represents 30.55% of Googlebot’s volume and is growing at 87% quarter-over-quarter, the referral traffic from these systems has actually decreased as a percentage of total traffic.

The more AI systems consume, the less they return.

This is not a bug—it’s the core feature of the new economy.

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