A new report reveals that AI agents are crawling, indexing, and interacting with websites at a volume most organizations are ill-equipped to handle.
Based on information from the DataDome network it shows a recorded 7.9 billion AI agent requests in January and February 2026 alone, a five percent increase over Q4 2025. For one customer, agentic traffic accounted for 9.75 percent of total traffic over a 30-day window.
“Invisible traffic is unmanaged traffic. And right now, most organizations cannot see this clearly enough to do anything meaningful about it,” says Jérôme Segura, VP of threat research at DataDome. “AI agent traffic is complex. Billions of requests are hitting sites every month, from agents with different identities, different purposes, and varying degrees of transparency about who they are.”
Agentic browser traffic is concentrated in the industries with the most valuable transactional data: e-commerce and retail (around 20 percent of volume), real estate (17 percent), and travel and tourism (15 percent).
Impersonation of known agents is widespread. Meta ExternalAgent is the most impersonated with 16.4M spoofed requests, followed by ChatGPT-User with 7.9M. PerplexityBot had the highest rate of impersonation, with nearly 2.4 percent of requests found to be fraudulent.
Meta ExternalAgent accounted for nearly 25 percent of top AI agent traffic on DataDome’s network in February 2026. ChatGPT-User followed at 19.1 percent, and Meta WebIndexer at 14.3 percent. One agent may drive referral value while another harvests data with no benefit to the site it visits.
You can get the full report from the DataDome site.
Image credit: Wanan Yossingkum/Dreamstime.com
