{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Media Copilot","title":"When bots become the audience ","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":2719,"description":"Bots now make up about half of all web traffic. Are they a threat to block or an audience to win? \nFor most of the web's history, the deal was simple. Search engines pointed people to websites, and those visits paid for the content through advertising and subscriptions. AI is rewriting that arrangement, and the clearest place to see it is in who, or what, is showing up at the door.\nAkamai says it now handles more than 150 billion bot requests a day, with AI bot traffic climbing more than 300% year over year. Bots account for roughly half of all internet traffic. On this episode of The Media Copilot podcast, Pete Pachal talks with two Akamai executives who sit on opposite sides of that shift: Kim Salem-Jackson, the company's chief marketing officer, and Patrick Sullivan, its CTO of security strategy. Their jobs once had little to do with each other. Now they are working the same problem from two directions.\nFor Sullivan, bots have been a security headache for more than a decade. What changed is that the most valuable visitor to a site is now also a bot: the retrieval and training crawlers that feed large language models. \"The VIP visitor to the website are the various bots that really make LLMs go,\" he says. Detection and blocking are no longer the point. Akamai keeps dozens of categories of bots and a menu of responses for each.\nFor Salem-Jackson, the reframe is sharper. She treats LLMs as a new audience, each with its own personality, the way a marketer treats different buyers. \"The bots are my new customer,\" she says. She monitors bot volume by the hour, rolls out a welcome mat, and watches whether her team's work on AI visibility pulls more crawlers in.\nThe catch is that the same bot looks like an opportunity to one business and a threat to another. A training crawler can compress a publisher's entire site, hand it to a model, and never send a reader back. Sullivan puts the ratio of training visits to human visits at tens of thousands to one. For a company...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/4EiFqLM4OC9vg9_Tigcvzf0FJU4e68DVprGgpAUDU4M/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS8zZGY3/ZTlmNDY3NDc0NjVm/NmNjMjNmZGM1ODNh/Y2JiYS5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}