kamai has released a new State of the Internet( SOTI) report examining

Protecting Publishing: Navigating the AI Bot Era finds that AI bot activity surged by 300 % in 2025, with the media industry, which includes publishers – ranking second globally with 13 % of AI bot traffic.

AI bots overwhelmingly targeted publishing organisations, which made up 40 % of that activity. This concentration highlights how content-rich websites have become prime targets for automated scraping.

Companies increasingly deploy AI bots to collect data for large language models( LLMs) and to power AI-driven search tools. While AI training crawlers generate the most automated traffic, AI fetchers – bots that retrieve content in real time to answer user queries – pose a more immediate threat. By delivering answers directly through AI assistants, these tools reduce the need for users to visit original content creators’ websites.

This shift is already impacting the publishing industry’ s bottom lines. The SOTI report found that AI chatbots drove approximately 96 % less referral traffic than traditional Google search in Q4 2024, sharply reducing a critical source of audience and revenue.

“ The fundamental shift in how people get their information is impacting publishers,” said Patrick Sullivan, Chief Technology Officer, Security Strategy, Akamai.“ AI bots are eroding core revenue streams, such as advertising and subscriptions, while driving up infrastructure costs and diminishing brand visibility. Fortunately, our report offers strategies to address this problem.”

he 2026 SANS Identity Threats & Defences Survey reveals that nonhuman and AI-driven identities are

multiplying faster than organisations can secure them.

In a global survey of over 500 security professionals, SANS found that non-human identities( NHIs), such as service accounts,

API keys, automation bots and workload identities, are now the fastest growing identity category, with three out of four organisations reporting growth. The number of identities operating inside organisations has‘ quietly doubled or tripled’, not because of more employees, but because machineto-machine processes now underpin core business operations.

Despite this rapid expansion, governance practices have not kept pace. Credential rotation remains a basic defence against longterm compromise, yet 92 % of organisations fail to rotate machine credentials on a 90-day cycle, creating a‘ forever access’ problem. Many organisations still rely on human-centric processes that struggle to scale across cloud, DevOps and SaaS environments, leaving gaps in cybersecurity resilience.

Richard Greene, Certified Instructor, SANS Institute, said:“ Organisations are giving AI systems real decision making power faster than they’ re building the governance to control it. We’ ve already seen what happens when non-human identities scale without guardrails, and Agentic AI is moving even faster. The early signs of governance are encouraging – nearly four in 10 organisations have now use human in-the-loop approvals for AI agent actions – but the real challenge is staying ahead of these systems as they shift from pilots to core operations.”

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