By Slobodan Manic
Publication Date: 2026-08-18 17:30:00
I think we’re aiming the machine-access fight at the wrong company. Publishers are deciding whether to block Google’s AI or license to it. Reddit spent part of its July 30 earnings call on exactly that question, and every move at that table gets covered like a summit. Meanwhile, the biggest machine reader of the web belongs to Meta. It reads more than the bots everyone blocks, it sends almost nothing back, and nobody seems to be discussing whether Zuckrawlers should be blocked.
Meta’s Crawlers Became The Majority While GPTBot Stayed The Most Blocked
DataDome, a bot-defense vendor, reports 17.7 billion AI agent requests across its network in the second quarter of 2026, up 45% from the first. The growth did not come from Google or OpenAI. Meta-ExternalAgent grew 74% quarter over quarter, Meta-WebIndexer grew 163%, and together Meta’s two agents now carry the majority of the AI agent traffic DataDome is seeing, with close to nothing returned in referrals. There is something…
