NEWTollBit State of the AI Bots - Q3 & Q4 2025

September 18, 2025

TollBit + DataDome Integration Is Now Live

The integration is live: DataDome customers can now activate TollBit directly and start monetizing compliant AI traffic in minutes.

A few weeks ago, we announced our partnership with DataDome to bring publishers and brands the ability to both protect their content and unlock new revenue streams from AI traffic.

Now that integration is officially live. DataDome customers can immediately begin routing AI agents through a secure, monetized path.

This means you can block what you don’t want, monetize what you do, and gain full visibility into all AI-driven traffic—all in one workflow.

What The Integration Gets You

Here’s what the live integration delivers today:

  • Unified AI traffic view
    See every AI bot request, inside one dashboard, providing your team with actionable insights.

  • Real-time protection
    DataDome’s multi-layered AI detects and blocks malicious bots—including scrapers, fraudsters, and fake signups—in under 2ms, with an industry-leading <0.01% false positive rate.

  • Monetization out-of-the-box
    Compliant AI agents are redirected to a TollBit paywall where you set pricing, terms, and access rules.

Hear from a customer:

“To ensure we are in control of who accesses our content, and to unlock new revenue from AI traffic to our leading online business publications, we turned to DataDome and TollBit,” said Patrick Hainault, VP Corporate Business Development at Mansueto Ventures, publisher of Inc. and Fast Company. “DataDome detects and handles the most sophisticated AI traffic, boosting our ability to monetize. In concert, TollBit manages access rights to our content by AI providers, based on rates we define, and handles payment collection. These two partners worked closely with us to deploy an elegant joint solution.”

Why It Matters for Publishers

AI traffic isn’t slowing down. In Q2 2025 alone:

  • AI scrapes more than tripled across sites with TollBit Analytics.

  • Robots.txt bypasses jumped nearly 4x.

  • Traffic to the TollBit Bot Paywall surged 360%.

For publishers, the costs of ignoring this wave are real: higher CDN bills, strained infrastructure, and lost content value.

With the TollBit + DataDome integration, you can flip that equation—protecting your site while capturing revenue from compliant AI bots.

How To Activate The Integration in the Datadome Dashboard

Link to DataDome docs.

1. Prerequisites

  • Be an active DataDome customer with an Admin access role to the Dashboard.
  • Have an active commercial relationship with a supported monetization partner.

2. Enable a Partner

On DataDome's dashboard, using Admin access:

  • Open Management > Monetize section
  • Enable your monetization partner
Enable your monetization partner Management > Monetize section of the dashboard

Enable your monetization partner Management > Monetize section of the dashboard

3. Define the traffic to monetize via TollBit

  • Under Access Control > AI Agents, choose the AI/LLM user agents that should trigger Monetize response policy.

4. Verify Tolbit bot tollbot response policy

Setting the response policy to Allow ensures eligible Tollbot traffic flows correctly.

  1. From the dashboard, Go to Access Control > AI Agents
  2. Use the search to find tollbot
  3. Make sure Response policy = Allow. Update if needed.

Better Together: Protection + Monetization

The TollBit + DataDome integration gives publishers more than just control—it delivers scale, security, and monetization in a single solution.

  • Proven protection: DataDome blocks over 400B+ attacks every year, keeping malicious bots out without slowing down performance.

  • Monetization: TollBit is trusted by 3,000+ publishers and websites worldwide to set terms, monitor access, and capture value from compliant AI traffic.

Together, this means you can detect and block bad actors with industry-leading accuracy while opening new monetization opportunities from the AI traffic you approve.

To learn more about DataDome check out their blog post here: https://datadome.co/changelog/monetize-ai-traffic-datadome-tollbit-integration/

You may also be interested in

March 8, 2024

Where Does the Ad Money Go?

The current model of digital advertising is on the cusp of a seismic shift. For as long as most of us have known the internet, a silent transaction underpinned most of what we encountered online: advertisers funded websites in exchange for the promise of our attention. In the background, ads loaded alongside articles, or played before videos, and revenue trickled in based on impressions or clicks. Yet, the rise of AI assistants threatens to turn this familiar system on its head.

Read more

September 17, 2025

TollBit Partners with Akamai to Power the Future of AI Traffic Monetization

We’re excited to announce our new technical alliance with [Akamai Technologies](https://www.akamai.com/), the cybersecurity and cloud computing company that powers and protects business online. Together, we’re helping publishers and site owners protect their websites, enforce fair usage, and unlock sustainable revenue streams from the next wave of AI traffic.

Read more

February 2, 2024

The New Era of Internet

The Internet we've known, for all its promise of accessibility, often falls short of true information democracy. Finding accurate, in-depth knowledge frequently means navigating complex paywalls, biased search rankings, and siloed platforms built to capture our attention, not empower our minds. With the advent of AI assistants, there might be a chance to break down barriers and rewire how we access the collective knowledge humanity has gathered online.

Read more